The Virtual Petrified Wood Museum.  Dedicated to the Exhibition and Educational Study of Permineralized Plant Material
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Tectonics
John McPhee gets to the very heart of how the Earth’s surface can be dramatically changed by slow rates of movement over vast stretches of time in Annals of the Former World.

“When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had formed into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone (McPhee, 1998, p. 124).”

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McPhee, J. (1998). Annals of the Former World. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.

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