## Metadata * Author: [[John McPhee]] * ASIN: B005H0O8KQ * ISBN: 0374105200 * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005H0O8KQ ## Highlights Her idea of exceptional affluence was a family that could afford fresh flowers. — location: [2362](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=2362) ^ref-55353 --- Where oil was first discovered in western Pennsylvania, it was seeping out of rocks and running in the streams. It is of a character and purity so remarkable that people used to buy it and drink it for their health. — location: [2631](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=2631) ^ref-33984 --- The Dutch crown ordered him to establish a mine, and to build a road on which the ore could be removed. The road ran up the Minisink and through level country to the Hudson River at Esopus Creek (Kingston, New York). A hundred miles long, it was the first constructed highway in the New World to cover so much distance. — location: [2855](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=2855) ^ref-5513 --- The earliest dated work is the Strickland Aquatint, 1830, with a long and narrow flat-bottomed Durham boat in the foreground on the river, four crewmen standing at their oars, — location: [3006](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=3006) ^ref-39043 --- where an easel had stood a hotel would follow. — location: [3014](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=3014) ^ref-47043 --- Von Humboldt wrote to say that he had now “read and compared all that has been written for and against the ice-period” and that he was no closer to accepting the theory. He quoted Mme de Sévigné’s saying that “grace from on high comes slowly.” And added, “I especially desire it for the glacial period.” — location: [3896](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=3896) ^ref-35616 --- “Come wander with me,” she said, “Into regions yet untrod; And read what is still unread In the manuscripts of God.” — location: [4005](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=4005) ^ref-31620 --- Boulder, Colorado, is backdropped with hogbacks (the Flatirons), which are more of the same Pennsylvanian strata leaning against the Front Range. — location: [4771](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=4771) ^ref-19311 --- One book mentioned an inscription above a doorway at the German Naval Officers School, in Kiel—an unlikely place for a Rocky Mountain geologist to discover what became for him a lifelong professional axiom. As he renders it in English: “Say not ‘This is the truth’ but ‘So it seems to me to be as I now see the things I think I see.’” — location: [5416](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=5416) ^ref-3758 --- I will consider myself a great success in life if I prove to be right fifty per cent of the time.” — location: [5483](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=5483) ^ref-4033 --- A geologic map is a textbook on one sheet of paper. — location: [5774](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=5774) ^ref-43066 --- It collected like roe on the brim of his Stetson. — location: [5936](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=5936) ^ref-59847 --- When the theory of plate tectonics developed, it asked as well as answered questions—and not a few of the questions were inconvenient to the theory. Many had to do with volcanism. — location: [5946](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=5946) ^ref-5325 --- Where was the closest subduction zone to the chain of peaks that culminates in Mt. Cameroon, a stratovolcano fifteen hundred miles from the nearest plate boundary of any kind? — location: [5950](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=5950) ^ref-35828 --- Hawaii is the world’s most preserved and trackable hot spot. — location: [5976](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=5976) ^ref-64524 --- craquelure — location: [6276](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=6276) ^ref-9533 --- A huge crack split the cliff from top to bottom and ran on out through the ledge and under the waves. After a five-hundred-mile northwesterly drift through southern and central California, this was where the San Andreas Fault intersected the sea. I — location: [6601](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=6601) ^ref-5429 --- paleobiologist — location: [6675](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=6675) ^ref-40162 --- The miners impounded water in the high country, then brought it to the gravels in ditches and flumes. In five years, they built five thousand miles of ditches and flumes. — location: [7002](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=7002) ^ref-6223 --- A hundred and six million ounces of gold—a third of all the gold that has ever been mined in the United States—came from the Sierra Nevada. — location: [7007](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=7007) ^ref-35753 --- The dry bed of an Eocene river carries Interstate 80 past Gold Run. — location: [7009](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=7009) ^ref-771 --- But you have to face the fact that if you are going to have an industrial society you must have places that will look terrible. Other places you set aside—to say, ‘This is the way it was.’” — location: [7041](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=7041) ^ref-61976 --- By 1865, at the end of the American Civil War, seven hundred and eighty-five million dollars had come out of the ground in California, making a difference—possibly the difference—in the Civil War. — location: [7054](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=7054) ^ref-38872 --- It is a question whether the United States could have stood the shock of the great rebellion of 1861 had the California gold discovery not been made. Bankers and business men of New York in 1864 did not hesitate to admit that but for the gold of California, which monthly poured its five or six millions into that financial center, the bottom would have dropped out of everything. — location: [7056](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=7056) ^ref-735 --- These timely arrivals so strengthened the nerves of trade and stimulated business as to enable the government to sell its bonds at a time when its credit was its life-blood and the main reliance by which to feed, clothe, and maintain its armies. Once our bonds went down to thirty-eight cents on the dollar. California gold averted a total collapse and enabled a preserved Union to come forth from the great conflict. — location: [7059](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=7059) ^ref-33754 --- In an April memorandum, the editor of the California Star says, in large letters, “HUMBUG” to the idea that gold in any quantity lies in the Sierra. Six weeks later, the Star ceases publication, because there is no one left in the shop to print it. — location: [7108](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=7108) ^ref-18145 --- In June, Colonel Mason travels from Monterey to San Francisco and on to New Helvetia to see for himself what is happening in the foothills. He takes Sherman with him. They find San Francisco “almost deserted,” its harbors full of abandoned ships. — location: [7116](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=7116) ^ref-27542 --- Ministers have abandoned their churches, teachers their students, lawyers their victims. Shops are closed. Jobs of all kinds have been left unfinished. As Mason and Sherman cross the Coast Ranges and the Great Central Valley, they see gristmills and sawmills standing idle, loose livestock grazing in fields of ripe untended grain, “houses vacant, and farms going to waste.” It is as if a devastating army had traversed a wide swath on its way to the foothills from the sea. — location: [7118](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=7118) ^ref-28455 --- Sauternes, — location: [7129](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=7129) ^ref-25354 --- Over most other miners, the Chinese have an advantage even greater than their numbers: they don’t drink. They smoke opium, certainly, but not nearly as much as the others like to think. The Chinese miners wear outsized boots and blue cotton. Their packs are light. They live on rice and dried fish. Their brothels thrive. They are the greatest gamblers in the Sierra. They make Caucasian gambling look like penny ante. — location: [7153](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=7153) ^ref-37197 --- The Hydraulic Press for October 30, 1858, says, “Nowhere do young men look so old as in California.” — location: [7165](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=7165) ^ref-24620 --- In 1853, Leland Stanford, twenty-nine years old, opens a general store in Michigan Bluff, about ten miles from Gold Run. John Studebaker makes wheelbarrows in Hangtown. — location: [7174](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=7174) ^ref-62692 --- auriferous — location: [7263](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=7263) ^ref-15433 --- “the Irishman’s famous down couch, which consisted of a single feather laid upon a rock.” — location: [7284](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=7284) ^ref-39805 --- State of California created in 1860 a state geological survey, and recruited the Yale-trained and already distinguished Josiah D. Whitney to be the state geologist. — location: [7296](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=7296) ^ref-46299 --- “Americans look upon water as an inexhaustible resource. It’s not, if you’re mining it. Arizona is mining groundwater.” — location: [7312](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=7312) ^ref-6863 --- Moores remarked, “If you want to find a fault in California, look for a dam.” — location: [7441](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=7441) ^ref-55718 --- “the eye seldom sees what the mind does not anticipate.” — location: [7525](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=7525) ^ref-47317 --- The Greeks used to survey a road by putting a hundred kilos on the back of a burro and sending him uphill. They followed the burro with a road. — location: [8106](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=8106) ^ref-16039 --- If a new highway must cross over something, like a railroad track, the road builders go back half a mile or so and sink the highway into the earth in order to dig out enough dirt to build ramps to a bridge jumping the railroad. — location: [8330](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=8330) ^ref-44746 --- Over open ocean, the number of miles you can see before your line of sight goes off the curve of the earth is roughly equal to the square root of your eye level in feet. If your eyes are forty-nine feet up, you can see seven miles to sky. — location: [8333](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=8333) ^ref-23979 --- Their street is named Patwin, for the tribe that preceded the farms and the walnuts. — location: [8397](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=8397) ^ref-29894 --- “Sonoma” means nose or the Land of Chief Nose. — location: [8544](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=8544) ^ref-33246 --- ‘In the next ten years, our confusion will reach new heights of sophistication.’” — location: [8780](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=8780) ^ref-56852 --- “Researchers have already cast much darkness on the subject, and if they continue their investigations we shall soon know nothing at all about it.”) — location: [8781](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=8781) ^ref-7703 --- In the median are dense effusions of oleander, in blossom pink and white, beguiling the westbound traffic with the pastel promise of California. — location: [8873](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=8873) ^ref-49720 --- If Alcatraz, Angel Island, Yerba Buena, and so forth were elsewhere in the Coast Ranges, they would be the summits of mountains, and not islands in a bay. — location: [8916](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=8916) ^ref-13915 --- Something has depressed the bay — location: [8917](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=8917) ^ref-31441 --- Streetcar to Subduction, — location: [8928](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=8928) ^ref-63845 --- Radiolaria — location: [8946](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=8946) ^ref-46364 --- “Though it faces possible destruction, San Francisco does not stop growing and that growth necessarily involves the erection of large and expensive structures.” — location: [8963](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=8963) ^ref-17426 --- In June, 1935, when the south tower stood nearly complete—seven hundred and forty-seven feet high, with no cables attached—it began to sway in a middle-energy earthquake. A construction worker named Frenchy Gales—as quoted in John van der Zee’s The Gate—continues the story:   It was so limber the tower swayed sixteen feet each way … . There were twelve or thirteen guys on top, with no way to get down. The elevator wouldn’t run. The whole thing would sway toward the ocean, guys would say, “Here we go!” Then it would sway back, toward the Bay. Guys were laying on the deck, throwing up and everything. I figured if we go in, the iron would hit the water. — location: [8964](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=8964) ^ref-21736 --- Charles Ellis, the chief designer, — location: [8970](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=8970) ^ref-53616 --- Around a pond in McLaren Park, nearby, are diabase boulders. — location: [8985](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=8985) ^ref-27807 --- The probable explanation is fog: the cold and almost quotidian sea fog that will overlap the coastal land when the air of California is otherwise cloudless; the fog that fosters the growth and survival of redwoods; the fog that conceals the Golden Gate Bridge and brings out the sounds of tubas. — location: [9021](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=9021) ^ref-26777 --- Their seventh day of residence was the Fourth of July, 1776. — location: [9040](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=9040) ^ref-63519 --- San Andreas Lake, it lay in the trace of the fault. Here, actually, was where the fault was given its name—by Andrew Lawson, in 1895, who thought he was describing a local feature when in fact it extended more than seven hundred miles. — location: [9046](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=9046) ^ref-31336 --- In 1986, a small earthquake on the Quien Sabe Fault, a deeply hidden blind thrust near the south end of the Hayward Fault, sent out elastic waves that shook open a twenty-thousand-gallon vat of cabernet sauvignon in an Almaden winery twenty-five miles from the epicenter. — location: [9395](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=9395) ^ref-37094 --- “People look upon the natural world as if all motions of the past had set the stage for us and were now frozen,” — location: [9429](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=9429) ^ref-25070 --- Moreover, the interpretation of geologic data was probably influenced by the psychologic need to view the earth as a stable environment. — location: [9436](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005H0O8KQ&location=9436) ^ref-9443 ---