The truth about kookaburras

This began when my mate Luke sent me a link to a laughing bird, asking if it was a kookaburra. I’m not a birder, but it was pretty obvious what this was, so I said yes. Then I added:

These two had just finished a long call on a
street light on the same level as my upper deck

You rarely get a single kookaburra calling, but they do so in small gangs, often from several sites at once. I'm not sure if the calling is from one gang staking a claim, or two gangs "beating the bounds". One of my incomplete studies is on introduced species in Australia, and colonists blamed the kookaburras for killing snakes, and exported them to the island colony of Tasmania and to Western Australia.

The research is all done: I might just do that this afternoon. One surprise: it took us 80+ years to stop calling them "laughing jackasses".

So here’s the lowdown on what my granddaughters call “kookas”.

The white invaders first noticed one of these birds in April 1788, when surgeon John White travelled with the governor, several officers, three soldiers and two seamen, to Manly Cove, not far from where I live. They headed north, their path was blocked by swamps and thick bush, probably where Manly Golf Club is now.

Going along the coast they went north to a “small salt-water lagoon, about two miles [3 km] away”, where they saw black swans. 

Black swans, Narrabeen Lake.

This sighting was probably on Curl Curl Lagoon, usually called Queenscliff Lagoon now. Then they saw a kookaburra which White correctly recognised as a kingfisher. But what did the Indigenous Australians call it? The earliest hint comes in 1829:

In the valley beneath on the other side is a large verandah cottage with dormer windows, and a row of Norfolk Island pines, each exactly tapering as if cut to resemble a pyramid and in front, is the little bay, called by the blacks Woolamoola. The aboriginal language is certainly beautiful and highly expressive, much, more so, we conceive, than an European tongue. Where did they get it? Gogaga is their name of the bird we call the Laughing Jackass, and Gogaga repeated quick is part of the chuckling notes, which distinguish that ludicrous forester. Here we have several public buildings close at hand. The Prisoners' Barracks, called by courtesy Hyde-Park Barracks, a neat brick building, in which are lodged and fed five and six hundred men, and in Macquarie's time double that number. [1]

George Bennett was for many years Sydney’s leading naturalist, and he encountered the bird in the 1830s:

19th century propaganda shot (NLA)

The natives at Yas called the bird ''Gogera,'' or ''Gogobera,'' probably from its peculiar note, which has some resemblance to the sound of the word. It is said that one seldom laughs without being accompanied by a second, forming a very harmonious duet.

This bird, from its devouring mice and venomous reptiles, deserves protection…A gentleman told me that he was perfectly aware of the birds destroying snakes, as he had often seen them carry the reptiles to a tree, and break their heads to pieces with their strong sharp beaks; he also said that he had known them destroy chickens…[2]

 

Two honey-eaters confronting a kookaburra
at dawn. The honey-eaters protect their chicks.

Around 1860, Bennett was calling it the “laughing kingfisher”. His ‘Mountain Pheasant’ is what we now call a lyre-bird.

The Mountain Pheasant is a good mocking-bird, for it imitates the notes of the more pleasing songsters, as well as the loud gurgling laugh of the Dacelo, or Laughing Kingfisher. The elegant tail-feathers, detached in their complete form, are sought after by collectors, and are sold in the shops; the natives also use the feathers, as well as those of the Emeu, as ornaments in their hair. [3]

We might note here that the “kangaroo feathers” worn in the hats of the Australian light horse were, in fact emu feathers. The practice and term “kangaroo feathers” date back to the Boer War, but that’s another story, told elsewhere. [4] It was only some years later, around 1871, that we suddenly began calling our national bird a kookaburra. [5]

Around Australia, only a few local species were thought to be worth shifting. Snake-killing kookaburras were sent to both Tasmania and WA. The alien birds took the hollow trees used by other birds, and while kookaburras may have killed some snakes, they also preyed on small mammals and lizards. It seems that the idea of introducing kookaburras to Tasmania is older than people realise, going back at least to 1848:

SNAKE KILLERS.—Can you inform me, Sir, if there are any birds or animals in this country which have the habit of killing snakes. I suppose eagles may kill a few, but should think not many; besides them, I cannot think of anything else, and I should like if anybody could inform me whether the Sydney laughing jackass would be likely to live in this colony, for they kill snakes commonly, and are very amusing.
—A COLONIST. [6]

The Launceston Examiner responded that there would be few more welcome visitors than “…the veritable laughing jackass, who is a universal favorite in the sister colony.” The paper hoped that some naturalist would take the matter up. All the same, it would take half a century, soon after kookaburras were introduced into Western Australia, going on this 1902 report:

By arrangement with Mr. D. Le Souef, director of the Melbourne Zoological Gardens, a shipment of 40 laughing jackasses has been obtained for introduction in Tasmania. Last year 50 of these useful reptile-destroyers were liberated in various parts of the island, with results so satisfactory that the “new importations are in great request, and applications have been sent in for a bird or two from so far afield as the Straits Islands. The curator of the City Park Gardens has charge of the birds, which it is proposed to sell at a cost calculated to defray expenses. [7]

Now back to the Western Australian introduction: in the 1860s, luminaries like Ferdinand von Mueller, George Bennett and Edward Wilson were collecting kookaburras for introduction into Britain, [8] but nothing seems to have come of this scheme. Then in 1897, with Western Australia oozing with gold wealth, a new plan emerged.

Mr W. E. Learoyd, was commissioned by the Acclimatisation Committee of Western Australia to proceed to the Eastern colonies to obtain a supply of oysters for laying down at Albany, and also some birds. He headed for Victoria, hoping to get birds, but a bird catcher there told him they were protected.

Checking with the chief clerk in the Colonial Secretary’s office, he learned that an Act of Parliament held the birds absolutely protected until 1899, and that a permit could not be given in the face of the Act. The helpful chief clerk suggested that he apply to the authorities in Sydney, where he could probably get 100 or 200 birds.

In the end, he got 40, 16 old ones and 24 young ones, but only three of the young ones survived. “On the other hand, the old ones carry well under the most trying circumstances”, Learoyd reported in 1897. [9]

In May 1898, the streamer Rockton delivered thirty kookaburras from Victoria to Fremantle, from there they were sent to settle in at the Zoological Gardens at South Perth. [10] Eighteen months later, they were doing well:

The committee intend introducing more of these interesting and useful birds, which not only relieve the monotony of the bush silence by their laughing note, but are also good friends to the agriculturist as they devour, besides snakes, numbers of noxious insects. [11]

In 1901, came a request to the citizens of Guildford that they stop shooting these “useful and interesting birds”. [12] In 1910, the West Australian offered a detailed report on the work of the Acclimatisation Committee in “correcting Western Australia’s deficiency”, a project which was praised.

A bit more about Bennett, though. In July 1860, he attended a council meeting in London of the Society for the Acclimatisation of Animals in the United Kingdom, where he was elected as a corresponding member. He then

… promised to present to the society a cage which he had invented for the transmission of birds across sea, and also to bring to the next council meeting some specimens of the "laughing jackass" in his possession. [13]

There is no trace of those British kookaburras today, but Bennett returned home, inspired and ready to work again in December. I’ll come back to Bennett some other time. He now rates of one of my slightly expired temporary obsessions, but I still have all the notes, and in lockdown time, they help the sanity.

It’s either that or the mad sheep. Yes, I'm back working on them.

---

[1] The Sydney Monitor, 9/3/1829, 2,  https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/31761614

[2] George Bennett, Wanderings in New South Wales, vol. 1, London: Richard Bentley, 1834, 222.

[3] George Bennett, Gatherings of a Naturalist in Australasia, 179 – 80.

[4] http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/writing/early-language.htm

[5] Ibid.

[6] Launceston Examiner, 2 February 1848, 5, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/36253996

[7] The Advertiser (Adelaide), 10 December 1902, 6, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/4905467

[8] The Argus, 22 August 1860, 8, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/5688402

[9] The West Australian (Perth), 7 January 1897, 2, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/3105197

[10] The West Australian (Perth), 6 May 1898, 5, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/3209194/762803

[11] The West Australian (Perth), 2 December 1899, 60, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/33185281

[12] The West Australian (Perth), 23 August 1901, 4, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/24757708

[13] 'Society for the Acclimatisation of Animals &c.', The Argus, Tuesday 9 October 1860, p. 5, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/5691233

I like to light fires

No, not bushfires, silly, though as readers of my new book Survivor Kids: get Ready for Wild Australia (released April 1, 2020) will learn, I used to light bush fires for research, under very tightly controlled conditions.

(I was a junior research assistant, supervised by senior scientists, and one of them did the actual lighting. Each day, we had tankers, up to 30 crew, knapsack sprays and tools, and the work we did gave rise to the present six-point bushfire danger scale.)

My recent silence is because I have been in New Zealand, playing with my grandkids and other kids, and thereby lies a tale of lighting a fire in the hearts of three anonymous children.


My wife and I decided to take in the Auckland Art Gallery, a superbly designed building with delightful Jura Grey limestone floors and stairs from Bavaria, all highly polished, and chockers with fossils.

Now as the people who travelled with me last year in Spain, Portugal and Morocco can attest, I keep my head down when on marble or limestone, watching out for fossils like the ones seen here.

(The second is a belemnite, an extinct squid-relative, the others are ammonites, and they are all from the Jurassic.)

I always lay down an Australian 50 cent coin for scale: the coins are 32 mm across.

This often draws attention when people only see me picking up the coin after getting a shot, and I have been known to claim that it's a form of magic, but really, it's just for scale purposes.

Let me tell you, though, that joy is discovering that the floors and stairs at the  are of fossil-stuffed limestone.

True joy is finding a father and three children interested enough to ask what I was photographing.


Sheer blissful joy is walking out the front door later to hear the oldest one, a girl of 8 or 9, giggling with glee at finding yet another fossil in the outdoor paving.


I think I won that one.


So yeah, my hobby is lighting fires.


And by the way, there's another book about to emerge as an e-book, previously announced as Not Your Usual Rocks.


It now has a new name and is now called Mistaken for Granite.  It's for older readers and armchair travellers who prefer not to hike over 3 km of blasted heath in stinging rain, only to be lowered down into a volcano. We did that, for the sake of the book.

School geology notes part 2

There appears to be a limit to the number of pics, so I had to split the entry in two.

  Once seen, never forgotten. Two examples of joints near Fairlight.

Geologists don’t really know how joints are formed, but they think it has to do with stresses being released as rocks above weather and erode away. And THAT brings us to weathering.

Weathering

All rocks break down in what geologists call “weathering”. This involves the decay of the rocks, combined with all the ways the planet has found for moving rock debris, erosion in other words, are both necessary for the rock cycle to operate. A lot of the most spectacular scenery emerges because some parts of the rock resist weathering, like Drawing Room Rocks near Berry, down the coast.

Here, the sandstone has accumulated an iron-rich layer near the top, but at a guess, water was able to get in through the joints, rock chipped away, and we ended up with this sort of pattern, with ‘occasional tables’.

In geology, nothing is completely permanent. For starters, there is no such thing as insoluble. Many of the minerals in rocks resist being dissolved, but over time, given enough time, no mineral is ever totally insoluble. Some minerals are rather more soluble, and if one mineral in a rock breaks down and washes out, it will only be a matter of time before the hard rock begins to crumble.

Air, heat and cold also play a major part in this breakdown, which is referred to as weathering. Geologists recognise two types of weathering: physical weathering, though this is sometimes called mechanical weathering, and this name probably tells us more about how it works.

All of the sandstone around the school shows clear signs of weathering. The sandstone face below and east of the library is a good example of one form of physical weathering caused by feet.

In 1969, just after major fires in the Royal National Park, I was sent out, in full ranger uniform, partly to see if the old tracks were visible, but also to ‘show the flag’. Where a track passed over sandstone, the path to walk was much lighter than the other rock: human feet had weathered the rock.

Lightning

There used to be a poor example of a lightning strike in the old nature area, but I think we lost that. No matter, it was unimpressive unless you knew what to look for.

   

Around the world, there are about 100 lightning strikes, somewhere, each second. That adds up to a lot of energy hitting things.

When lighting fails to hit a building, a tree, a foolish kite flyer or an unwise golfer, it usually hits rock. Lightning often comes with rain, and when the water has already soaked into a rock, the instant heat of a lightning strike turns that water to steam, flaking off a surface layer. Once the rock is in small pieces, other weathering effects can take over.

Note that these blasts happen on high places in storms. The traces are best sought for in good weather. If you are on a high place in lightning, move away! The danger signal comes when long hair starts to float up into the air, but by then, it may be too late…

And now for my favourite rock forms, which appear in the school grounds only in minor and beginning forms, visible only to a prepared eye.

Honeycomb weathering

Geology shapes our scenery, sculpting the rocks around us, and one of the delights of my home area is honeycomb weathering, sometimes called alveolar weathering by people of French background, while others call it fretting, stone lattice, or most poetically, stone lace.

Honeycomb weathering in Hawkesbury sandstone, some of it cross-bedded, near Box Head, north of Sydney.

Much of the best-exposed sandstone near Sydney is close to the coast, and around the world, it is common to blame salt spray for honeycomb weathering. The idea is that salt spray lands on and soaks into the stone, but when the water evaporates, salt crystals are supposed to wedge sand grains off.

There is definitely more to the picture and that, and while salt spray probably plays a part, as a young man, I saw honeycomb weathering in the Budawang Ranges, 40 km from the nearest sea coast. I have no surviving photographs from that time, but I do have something rather similar from the flanks of Uluru, on the far side from where the climbers used to start.

A curious but entirely natural weathering effect on the side of Uluru.

   

Ant lions

Ant lions were the first insects I ever studied, and they make neat pits in sandy soil. There used to be lots of them under the old demountables, and there should be some under the trees. They are the larvae of lacewings, alias Myrmeleontidae (Neuroptera). The name ‘lacewings’ describes their pretty wings quite well, but ‘ant lion’ is a good name for the larval stage. Instead of hunting like lions though, they dig pits in the sand and sit at the bottom, waiting for an ant to fall in.

I once saw one of these animals capture a small weevil, but usually, they eat ants. Whatever the prey is, once the unlucky animal reaches the bottom, the ant lion seizes it in its pincers and sucks it dry. In the end, it flicks the empty husk of the prey out of the pit. Ant lions are neat!

To find these curious creatures, look for a small conical pit, 1–3 cm across in dry sandy soil. The soil may be close to one of those gum trees with sap that kills grass, or inside a hollow tree, along the edge of a building or under a rocky overhang. Sometimes, you can even see ant lion pits, right out in the open in the dry season on Cape York, in the summer around Myall Lakes in NSW and in dry areas. All they need is dry sandy soil.

A large ant lion can be 6 mm long, but 1.5 mm of that length may be the nippers that it uses to seize its prey. It digs a pit by backing into the sand and moving in a circle, flicking sand out with its head. Recent research on fossils in amber suggests they have made pits for 100 million years.

Dry sand only piles up to a certain slope, called the angle of rest, and this is the slope of the sides of every pit. At this angle, the sand is unstable and ready to tumble down if a small animal walks near the edge. As soon as sand grains hit the bottom, the ant lion starts flicking sand up from the bottom of the pit. Some sand falls down again, knocking its prey down the slope, but if the ant lion flicks enough sand out from below, the whole slope begins to slide down, carrying the food animal with it. Ant lions are easy to keep but they aren’t geological.

A moral tale for kids:

Whenever people in the outback dug a well in a sandy river bed or climbed a dune, they were in the same position as ants, except that there was no monster waiting to grab them and suck them dry. The real danger came as they dug down close to water, because damp sand will hold together, and they could dig a steep-sided hole. Then when the sand dried, it would collapse.

Each year in Australia, one or two children are killed when a sand cave collapses on them. No explorers were ever killed that way, but probably a few needed their companions to dig them out.

As you can see, in science, everything is connected. We teach them to read the rocks, and weave a web around them!

*****************************************

A small advertisement: some of the illustrations appearing here will be in my upcoming Not Your Usual Rocks. This is now moving into final editing, and will either be the subject of a contract for a coffee table book by mid-June, or it will be issued as a delicious e-book by April 2020.

School geology notes part 1

I work as a volunteer 'visiting scientist' at a local K-6 school, and the last two years have been turmoil as it was rebuilt to meet climbing population figures. In the process, some beautiful nature was destroyed, but the place is bouncing back, and I saw that there was now some exciting sedimentary geology to play with.

Today was the last day of the year, and I was there to show the teachers what is available to use, and I wrote these notes before I went.

Stories

Rocks tell stories, and some of these stories are at a simple THE CAT SAT ON THE MAT level. Other stories that the rocks have to tell are more like Virginia Woolf on a bad day.

Getting kids started on reading is a bit like edging them onto a slippery slope on a bicycle and keeping them on an even keel as they get up to speed, carried along by natural forces. OK, that’s a stretched analogy, but slippery slopes are one of my long-term temporary obsessions. All you need, in order to play is a sand dune, but a Vegemite jar half full of sand will do as well.

Once seen, never forgotten: I had to learn this sort of stuff for myself, but each bit, once I acquired it, became part of my ongoing observations. The linking theme here is that sand that is piled up collapses to form a fixed angle (for that sort of sand), and that angle shows up in dunes, rocks, sandbanks, pits and holes in dry sand and more.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
—John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911, chapter 6.

A slippery slope in a jar

The thinking for this began when I had an idea to try something. I was getting ready to work on the track with Stage 2, I think. Our topic was flowers and stuff, but I spotted the rock on the right, and saw one of my favourite simple stories: current bedding or cross bedding.

I will explain what that is shortly, but let’s walk before we gallop down the slope, OK? Just watch how all of the bits come together, in the end.

Advancing dune, Sahara

Ant lion pit, coin for scale

Current bedding, as I prefer to call it, tells us something odd about sand. If you tip dry sand out of a funnel in the sandpit, it will

form a conical pile, and I can predict to within a couple of degrees the angle that the sand will lie at. We call this angle the angle of rest, and that’s the last bit of jargon.

Angle of rest in a jar. Use a cylindrical
and clean, very dry sand.

Ant lions (I will talk about them later) make pits in dry sand, like the one on the left, and the sides also lie at the angle of rest, as does the front of an advancing dune in the Sahara.

So there I was, clutching a Vegemite jar, half full of dry sand. I always carry this in case somebody happened to need a jar of dry sand, and a full jar is too heavy… I bounded onto the rock, declared that I was sitting on a 205 million-year-old fossil, then moved among the kids and showed them the jar, rolling it.

I explained that when sand is pushed along by wind or water, it gets pushed over the front, and this creates (drum roll please!):

Current bedding

Once you know what you are looking for, it’s everywhere, and any kid who has been shown the secret will be able to share it with others. Any cutting, any cliff is likely to reveal beds of sandstone, laid down as sand banks: the picture geologists have of Sydney in the Triassic (~205 million years ago) is a giant sandy river delta, a bit like Bangladesh today.

Three examples of current bedding: (top) Old Man’s Hat, Inner North Head; (centre) Sydney Road Fairlight, Manly side of the shops; and Malabar.

The shots above are easy to spot: the ones around the school need a trained eye. Let the training begin!

(A note to my teachers, less relevant to others: In all of these shots, I have left background in place, so you can come back and look at them.)

 

 

 

 

 

As you can see, the layering is more subtle when it comes to bush rock. The right-hand shot éabove is on the cycle track, and every cyclist going along there is running over 205 million-year-old fossils.

But how do we know the age? We don’t, not really, but the rock is Triassic, making it between 180 million and 220 million, and the sandstone is early to middle Triassic, so 205 million years is near enough for government work. Talk to me if you want more, because explanations require lots of hand waving..

 

On the western side of the school, the sawn stone has nice banding, and this is a Virginia Woolf sort of story, so here’s the Classics Illustrated/Cliff Notes version/. Iron occurs in compounds in two forms that old chemists called ferrous, which is soluble and ferric which is insoluble.

Banded iron in sandstone.

The ferrous form is now called Fe²⁺, and the ferric form is Fe³⁺. The key thing is that one can change into the other, Fe²⁺ seeps away, but when it changes to Fe³⁺, it stops where it is. Chemists say that iron II is oxidised to iron III and iron III is reduced to iron II.

Iron banding and Liesegang patterns

I didn’t find any Liesegang patterning around the school, but this is the same iron II/iron III story.

     

The same explanation applies to the iron banding we can see, and some of that is spectacular:

 

Joints

I was tricked when I thought I had found a joint in the sandstone. Joints are planes of weakness that are seen in most rocks, but they are particular important in the shaping of Sydney, because when sea levels fell, streams and rivers were directed along the jointing patterns, which is why the city has so many east-west and north-south valleys.

When the sea rose at the end of the last Ice Age, it flowed into those valleys, and we say that the fern leaf pattern of the harbour is a drowned river valley. Anyhow, those ‘joints’ were cut with a saw, but they give you some fresh rock to look at. There are no joints that I can see in the school grounds now, but below are some local joints:

  

Above: three examples of joints: (top) Old Man’s Hat, Inner North Head; (centre) Sydney Road Fairlight, north side; and on the way to Fairy Bower.

There appears to be a limit to the number of images I can insert, so this is continued in part 2.

Australian Backyard Earth Scientist

I have now turned back to earth science for younger readers again, as the editor's responses come my way from the Number One editor at the National Library of Australia, Jo Karmel. This is the fifth book we have worked on together (or seventh, if you count new editions separately), and there's another on the way

Anyhow, by the time we are finished, Australian Backyard Earth Scientist is going to be a good book, but here are some left-overs, more suited to older readers. These might have been epigraphs, but we don't do those for younger readers. Here are the unused quotes, and a few pics from my short-list (~250 shots at last count).

You can find more extra shots at these links:
ABES Teaching Pictures
ABES Teaching Pictures 2
ABES Teaching Pictures 3

ABES Teaching Pictures 4

ABES Teaching Pictures 5

ABES Teaching Pictures 6

Earth science

Folds, Mt Pilatus, Switzerland.

A rolling stone gathers no moss.

— Proverb, dating back to the 16th century.

To a naturalist nothing is indifferent; the humble moss that creeps upon the stone is equally interesting as the lofty pine which so beautifully adorns the valley or the mountain: but to a naturalist who is reading in the face of the rocks the annals of a former world, the mossy covering which obstructs his view, and renders indistinguishable the different species of stone, is no less than a serious subject of regret.

― James Hutton, Theory of the Earth, vol. 3, 46.

A rock or stone is not a subject that, of itself, may interest a philosopher to study; but, when he comes to see the necessity of those hard bodies, in the constitution of this earth, or for the permanency of the land on which we dwell, and when he finds that there are means wisely provided for the renovation of this necessary decaying part, as well as that of every other, he then, with pleasure, contemplates this manifestation of design, and thus connects the mineral system of this earth with that by which the heavenly bodies are made to move perpetually in their orbits.

— James Hutton. Theory of the Earth, with Proofs and Illustrations, Vol. 1 (1795), 276.

An historian should, if possible, be at once profoundly acquainted with ethics, politics, jurisprudence, the military art, theology; in a word, with all branches of knowledge … It would be no less desirable that a geologist should be well versed in chemistry, natural philosophy, mineralogy, zoology, comparative anatomy, botany; in short, in every science relating to organic and inorganic nature.

— Sir Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, Vol. 1, 3, 1835.

…the successive series of stratified formations are piled on one another, almost like courses of masonry.

— William Buckland, Geology and Mineralogy, Considered with Reference to Natural Theology, Bridgewater Treatise 6, Vol. 1, 37, 1836.

Folds and faults, S. coast NSW.

[When] spring and summer come round, how easily may the hammer be buckled round the waist, and the student emerge from the dust of town into the joyous air of the country, for a few delightful hours among the rocks.

— Sir Archibald Geikie, in The Story of a Boulder: or, Gleanings from the Note-book of a Field Geologist (1858), viii.

Apart from its healthful mental training as a branch of ordinary education, geology as an open-air pursuit affords an admirable training in habits of observation, furnishes a delightful relief from the cares and routine of everyday life, takes us into the open fields and the free fresh face of nature, leads us into all manner of sequestered nooks, whither hardly any other occupation or interest would be likely to send us, sets before us problems of the highest interest regarding the history of the ground beneath our feet, and thus gives a new charm to scenery which may be already replete with attractions.

— Sir Archibald Geikie, Outlines of Field-Geology (1900), 251-2.

Experimental geology has this in common with all other branches of our science, petrology and palaeontology included, that in the long run it withers indoors.

— Phillip H. Kuenen’ 'Experiments in Geology', Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow (1958), 23, 25.

No Geology without Marine Geology!

— Phillip H. Kuenen, Title of paper, Geologische Rundschau, 47(1), 1958, 1 – 10.

Geology itself is only chemistry with the element of time added.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Aspects of Culture, The American and Continental Monthly, Volume 1, April 1870, 5.

Beneath all the wealth of detail in a geological map lies an elegant, orderly simplicity.

— Tuzo Wilson, As quoted G.D. Garland in obituary 'John Tuzo Wilson', Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society (Nov 1995), 552.

Atoms

Hexagonal packing can turn up unexpectedly.

To understand the very large, we must understand the very small.

— Democritus (470 – 380 BC)

… in the field some amount of information concerning igneous rocks can be obtained by rubbing down the chip on a grindstone and using a whetstone, carborundum file, or water of Ayr stone for the final grinding. By these and other methods … there are obtained slices of rocks which, though thick, uneven, scratched, and all that is bad, from the point of view of the professional maker of thin sections, are nevertheless capable of yielding much information. With a pocket lens it is possible to make out from such a 'thin' section the nature of the minerals present, the texture and the nature of the rock.

— Frank Rutley, Elements of Mineralogy, 22nd edition, 1915, p. 104.

The difference between a piece of stone and an atom is that an atom is highly organised, whereas the stone is not. The atom is a pattern, and the molecule is a pattern, and the crystal is a pattern; but the stone, although it is made up of these patterns, is just a mere confusion. It's only when life appears that you begin to get organisation on a larger scale. Life takes the atoms and molecules and crystals; but, instead of making a mess of them like the stone, it combines them into new and more elaborate patterns of its own.

— Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963), Time Must Have a Stop. London: Chatto and Windus, 1945, chapter 14.

A crystal lacks rhythm from excess of pattern, while a fog is unrhythmic in that it exhibits a patternless confusion of detail.

— A. N. Whitehead (1861 – 1947), An Introduction to Mathematics. Oxford: OUP, 1948.

 Change

One generation passeth away and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever.

— Holy Bible, Ecclesiastes, 1:4

To explain the observed phenomena, we may dispense with sudden, violent and general catastrophes, and regard the ancient and present fluctuations . . . as belonging to one continuous and uniform series of events.

— Sir Charles Lyell (1797 – 1875), Principles of Geology.

Rather more than a century ago Sir Charles Lyell, then an Oxford student, noticed that a small lake on his father's Scotch estate was capable of depositing an appreciable layer of limestone on its bottom within quite a few years — and on his discovery that rocks could be built up as well as worn away is based a large part of modern geology.

— A. W. Haslett, Unsolved Problems of Science, London 1937.

Thermal mud, Orakei Korako, New Zealand

Compared with what we think of as long periods in our everyday calculations, there must have been enormous time and considerable variations in circumstances for nature to lead the organisation of animals to the degree of complexity and development that we see today.

— Chevalier de Lamarck (1744 – 1829), Philosophie Zoologique.

We may confidently come to the conclusion, that the forces which slowly and by little starts uplift continents, and that those which at successive periods pour forth volcanic matter from open orifices, are identical.

— Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World, 2nd edn. (1845), ch. XIV, 311.

… millions of our race are now supported by lands situated where deep seas once prevailed in earlier ages. In many districts not yet occupied by man, land animals and forests now abound where the anchor once sank into the oozy bottom.

— Sir Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, Vol. 1, 373, 1835.

While a glacier is moving, it rubs and wears down the bottom on which it moves, scrapes its surface (now smooth), triturates the broken-off material that is found between the ice and the rock, pulverizes or reduces it to a clayey paste, rounds angular blocks that resist its pressure, and polishes those having a larger surface. At the surface of the glacier, other processes occur. Fragments of rocks that are broken-off from the neighbouring walls and fall on the ice, remain there or can be transported to the sides; they advance in this way on the top of the glacier, without moving or rubbing against each other … and arrive at the extremity of the glacier with their angles, sharp edges, and their uneven surfaces intact.

— Louis Agassiz, La théorie des glaciers et ses progrès les plus récents. Bibl. universelle de Genève, (3), Vol. 41, p.127. Trans. Karin Verrecchia.

On the morning of May 8th, 1902, the clocks of St. Pierre ticked on towards ten minutes of 8 when they would stop forever. Against a background of bright sunshine, a huge column of vapour rose from the cone of Mont Pelée.

A salvo of reports as from heavy artillery. Then, choked by lava boiled to white heat by fires in the depths of the earth, Pelée with a terrific explosion blew its head off.

— Fairfax Downey, 'Last Days of St. Pierre', in Disaster Fighters, G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Temperature gradients in ordinary [volcanically] quiet areas range from less than 10 to as much as 50 degrees Celsius per kilometre.

— A. E. Benfield, 'The Earth's Heat', Scientific American Reader (1953), page 71.

Volcanic bombs in the making, Mt Yasur, Tanna, Vanuatu.

Naturally a good deal of thought has been given to how the immense energy of volcanoes might be harnessed for man's use. It has been done on a relatively minor scale in several countries, notably Italy and Iceland.

— A. E. Benfield, 'The Earth's Heat', Scientific American Reader (1953), page 86.

Just as the level of Stone Age finds gives an average sinkage of 9 inches in a hundred years, so calculations based on Roman remains suggest a similar figure… Presumably it is still doing so to-day, although it will be another five hundred or a thousand years before the problem of maintaining the Thames embankment will begin to become acute.

— A. W. Haslett, Unsolved Problems of Science, London 1937. (The Thames Barrier went into operation in 1986!).

Field reversals, occurring roughly every million years, are the most dramatic of the wide range of phenomena exhibited by the earth's magnetic field. And the next reversal on Earth may not be so far away: if the current rate of decay of the Earth's dipole component is maintained, it will vanish in less than 2000 years' time.

— Jeremy Bloxham, 'Evidence for asymmetry and fluctuation', Nature, 322: 13, 1986

Time

The poor world is almost six thousand years old . . .

— William Shakespeare (1564-1616), As You Like It, IV, i, 95

There are said to be a billion billion insects on the earth at any moment, most of them with very short life expectancies by our standards.

— Lewis Thomas (1913 – ), The Lives of a Cell, Penguin Books, 1978.

We can be certain that the radiation did not change appreciably during the last 500 million years; because during all this time life existed on earth, which means that the temperature of the earth during the whole period must have been very nearly what it is today. This temperature is determined by the sun's radiation.

— Hans Albrecht Bethe (1906-000), The Sky, December 1940.

More recently, advances in physics have given us methods to put absolute dates, in millions of years, on rocks and the fossils that they contain. These methods depend on the fact that particular radioactive elements decay at precisely known rates. It is as though precision-made miniature stopwatches had been conveniently buried in the rocks. Each stopwatch was started at the moment that it was laid down. All that the palaeontologist has to do is dig it up and read off the time on the dial.

— Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, Penguin, 1986.

 

Slate blocks, Norway.

According to this view of the matter, there is nothing casual in the formation of Metamorphic Rocks. All strata, once buried deep enough, (and due TIME allowed!!!) must assume that state,—none can escape. All records of former worlds must ultimately perish.

— Sir John Herschel, Letter to Mr Murchison, quoted in the Appendix to Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment (1838), 240.

Fossils

… implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

— Charles Dickens, Bleak House, London, 1852, page 1.

Life has come to be regarded by the majority of biologists as forming one vast genealogical tree, the roots of which are buried deep down in the lowest fossiliferous strata, and the tops of whose branches, constituting the life that now exists on the globe, are alone seen above the surface.

— John Gibson, 'Fossil fishes of Scotland' in Science Gleanings in Many Fields (1884).

Fossils in marble, Sydney.

We are lucky to have fossils at all. It is a remarkably fortunate fact of geology that bones, shells and other hard parts of animals, before they decay, can occasionally leave an imprint which later acts as a mould, which shapes hardening rock into a permanent memory of the animal. We don't know what proportion of animals are fossilized after their death — I personally would consider it a very great honour to be fossilized — but it is certainly very small indeed.

— Richard Dawkins (1941 – ), The Blind Watchmaker, Penguin Books, 1988, p. 225.

David Davies, a Welsh mine foreman, was the first to make really large collections of plant material from different coal seams. He showed that even when the plants did not differ very much, there were differences in the proportions of different kinds, just as in one meadow you will find a great deal of clover among the grass, in another very little.
J.B.S.Haldane (1892-1964) Everything Has a History, Allen and Unwin 1951, page 50.

 

Fossils in a limy sandstone, W.A.

If a single well-verified mammal skull were to turn up in 500 million years-old rocks, our whole modern theory of evolution would be utterly destroyed. Incidentally, this is sufficient answer to the canard, put about by creationists and their journalistic fellow travellers, that the whole theory of evolution is an 'unfalsifiable' tautology. Ironically, it is also why creationists are so keen on the fake human footprints, which were carved during the depression to fool tourists, in the dinosaur beds of Texas.

— Richard Dawkins (1941 – ), The Blind Watchmaker, Penguin Books, 1988, page 225.

Soil

Erosion in a spoil heap, South Australia.

In the agricultural sense soils are the superficial layers, usually less than a foot in thickness, of disintegrated and decomposed rock material, which is mingled with organic matter, and furnishes the necessary conditions and materials for plant growth.

— G. W. Tyrrell, The Principles of Petrology, Methuen, 1929, p. 184.

As to the ground or soil, it is in general but very indifft — in some parts nothing but hard, solid rock, in others a black sand full of ant hills.  In some spots, however, it is better, in one place especially we have found some good strong clay of wh they have already begun to make bricks wh are said to be very good.

The Governor has taken several excursions inland many miles into the Country.  First a little to the Northward — here the ground and country are most wretched, nothing to be seen but impassable Rocks, thickets, & swamps.  Next he went more towards the S.W.  Here he met with better ground — also with blue shale, a thing likely to be of great service to the Settlement.  The wood is in general very ordinary & bad for building.

— George Mackaness (ed.), Some Letters of Rev. Richard Johnson, B.A., First Chaplain of New South Wales, 2 parts: Australian Historical Monographs, new series vols XX and XXI, Sydney: D.S.Ford, 1954, part I, page 19 (letter dated May 8, 1788). 

Some idea may be formed of the appearance of the country by what is seen on the South Head Road, near the Light House. At the distance of a mile from the Heads, the spectator comes to a spot from which he can behold nothing but rock blackened, with the effects of fire. Every tree, shrub, flower, or atom of grass, has been burnt to the very root; and accustomed as the eye is here to look with indifference upon large tracts of land around, with scorched and half consumed trees, one cannot contemplate the scenes we allude to without becoming sensible of an extraordinary sensation, produced by the air of desolation with which one is surrounded.

Cattle at this season are much distressed for want of water. The stockmen are obliged to drive them to the distance of many miles, even for the scanty supply which a small creek or rivulet affords.

— The Australian (Sydney), 9 December 1826, 3.

Simulating sedimentation.

We are wealthy and wasteful but this can't go on. If we don't eat dog biscuits, we could end up eating our dog instead.

— Magnus Pyke (1908 – 1992)

Now I submit that we cannot say much which is sympathetic to our time unless we have assimilated our immediate tradition, which for this country is the conquest of soil and climate. Accordingly, it is a function of Biology in the University to provide this ingredient in education.

— Professor Eric Ashby, The Place of Biology in Australian Education, inaugural lecture, Sydney, 1939.

Climate and weather

In parts of Siberia the southern boundary of permanently frozen ground is receding poleward several dozen yards per annum.

— George Kimble, Scientific American, 1950.

While all the evidence goes to show that carbonic acid is now an almost invariable constituent of the air, it is one that requires least change in the physical conditions under which the earth exists to effect a change in its proportion. Minute as the proportion is, the delicacy of its relation to animal and vegetable life on the earth makes the maintenance of the apparently unstable equilibrium a matter of serious concern to mankind.

— Scientific American, October 1883, quoted in Scientific American, October 1983, p. 11

Occasional droughts occur throughout the colony at periods varying from ten to fifteen years: and periodical floods of a destructive character have at various times caused a serious loss of life and property.

— George French Angas, Australia: a Popular Account, 1866, 140.

We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of the element of air, which by unquestioned experiments is known to have weight, and so much, indeed, that near the surface of the earth, where it is most dense it weighs about one four-hundredth of the weight of water [actually more like 1/775]. Those who have written about twilight, moreover, have observed that the vaporous and visible air rises above us to about [80 kilometres]; I do not believe its height to be so great, since if it were, I could show that the vacuum would be able to offer much greater resistance than it does…

— Evangelista Torricelli, in a letter to Michelangelo Ricci, 1644.

Not that there is anything very mysterious ... if it is remembered that a barometer is merely a weighing balance under another name. Instead of weighing a letter or a parcel against a series of standardised weights, it weighs the whole mass of air above it, right to the top of the atmosphere, against a column of mercury. An area of high pressure … is the outward and ground-level sign of a mountain of air above. The mountain of air is heavy. So the mercury has to rise higher…

— A. W. Haslett, Unsolved Problems of Science, London 1937.

Attributed bits, lacking sources.

I could more easily believe that two Yankee professors would lie than that stones would fall from heaven.

— Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), in 1807.

I agree. But I wonder what it would have looked like if the sun had been circling the earth.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), on being told how foolish the ancients were for accepting the Ptolemaic system.

My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

— J. B. S. Haldane (1892 – 1964)

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

— Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)