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The Sea Around Us QUOTES

The Sea Around Us QUOTES

1 " It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself. "

― Rachel Carson , The Sea Around Us

2 " With these surface waters, through a series of delicately adjusted, interlocking relationship, the life of all parts of the sea is linked. What happens to a diatom in the upper, sunlit strata of the sea may well determine what happens to a cod lying on a ledge of some rocky canyon a hundred fathoms below, or to a bed of multicolored, gorgeously plumed seaworms carpeting an underlying shoal. or to a prawn creeping over the soft oozes of the sea floor in the balckness of mile-deep water. "

― Rachel Carson , The Sea Around Us

3 " Eventually man, too, found his way back to the sea. Standing on its shores, he must have looked out upon it with wonder and curiosity, compounded with an unconscious recognition of his lineage. He could not physically re-enter the ocean as the seals and whales had done. But over the centuries, with all the skill and ingenuity and reasoning powers of his mind, he has sought to explore and investigate even its most remote parts, so that he might re-enter it mentally and imaginatively. "

― Rachel Carson , The Sea Around Us

4 " The next time you stand on a beach at night, watching the moon’s bright path across the water, and the conscious of the moon-drawn tides, remember that the moon itself may have been born of a great tidal wave of earthly substance, torn off into space. And remember if the moon was formed in this fashion, the event may have had much to do with shaping the ocean basins and the continents as we know them. "

― Rachel Carson , The Sea Around Us

5 " Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal-each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water. "

― Rachel Carson , The Sea Around Us

6 " To dispose first and investigate later is an invitation to disaster, for once radioactive elements have been deposited at sea they are irretrievable. The mistakes that are made now are made for all time. "

― Rachel Carson , The Sea Around Us

7 " The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the earth. "

― Rachel Carson , The Sea Around Us

8 " The sea is blue because the sunlight is reflected back to our eyes from the water molecules or from very minute particles suspended in the sea. In the journey of the light rays downward into the water and back to our eyes, all the red rays of the spectrum and most of the yellow have been absorbed, so it is chiefly the cool, blue light that we see. "

― Rachel Carson , The Sea Around Us

9 " As soon as the earth’s crust cooled enough, the rains began to fall. Never have there been such rains since that time. They fell continuously, day and night, days passing into months, into years, into centuries. They poured into the waiting ocean basins, or, falling upon the continental masses, drained away to become sea. "

― Rachel Carson , The Sea Around Us

10 " Although man’s record as a steward of the natural resources of the earth has been a discouraging one, there has long been a certain comfort in the belief that the sea, at least, was inviolate, beyond man’s ability to change and to despoil. But this belief, unfortunately, has proved to be naïve. "

― Rachel Carson , The Sea Around Us

11 " And as life began in the sea, so each of us begins his identical life in a miniature ocean within his mother's womb. "

― Rachel Carson , The Sea Around Us

12 " Every grain of sand or silt carried out by the rivers and deposited at sea displaces a corresponding amount of water. "

― Rachel Carson , The Sea Around Us

13 " The small island of Bogoslof, since it was first observed in 1796, has altered its shape and position several times and has even disappeared completely, only to emerge again. The original island was a mass of black rock, sculptured into fantastic, tower-like shapes. Explorers and sealers coming upon it in the fog were reminded of a castle and named it Castle Rock. At the present time there remain only one or two pinnacles of the castle, a long spit of black rocks where sea lions haul out, and a cluster of higher rocks resounding with the cries of thousands of sea birds. Each time the parent volcano erupts, as it has done at least half a dozen times since men have been observing it, new masses of steaming rocks emerge from the heated waters, some to reach heights of several hundred feet before they are destroyed in fresh explosions. "

― Rachel Carson , The Sea Around Us

14 " At altitudes of 6000 to 16,000 feet, and with wind velocities reaching 45 miles an hour, many living insects have been taken. "

― Rachel Carson , The Sea Around Us

15 " But man, unhappily, has written one of his blackest records as a destroyer on the oceanic islands. He has seldom set foot on an island that he has not brought about disastrous changes. He has destroyed environments by cutting, clearing, and burning; he has brought with him as a chance associate the nefarious rat; and almost invariably he has turned loose upon the islands a whole Noah’s Ark of goats, hogs, cattle, dogs, cats, and other non-native animals as well as plants. Upon species after species of island life, the black night of extinction has fallen. "

― Rachel Carson , The Sea Around Us

16 " The Eskimos began to make troublesome raids... "

― Rachel Carson , The Sea Around Us

17 " we are still in the warming-up stage following the last Pleistocene glaciation—that the world’s climate, over the next thousands of years, will grow considerably warmer before beginning a downward swing into another Ice Age. But what we are experiencing now is perhaps "

― Rachel Carson , The Sea Around Us