Louis Vis

“Sedimentary rocks are formed by the deposition and then cementation together of material which either eroded from older rocks or was produced biologically – sandstone, limestone and chalk are all examples. Igneous rocks such as granite, on the other hand, solidify from volcanic lava or magma still deep underground. And when sedimentary or igneous rocks are subjected to high temperatures and pressures – caught in the crunch of continental collisions or when magma intrudes up into them – they are transformed physically and chemically, becoming a metamorphic rock like marble or slate.”
― Lewis Dartnell, Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History

“By 2100, if we do not halt emissions, as much as 5 percent of the world’s population will be flooded every single year.6 Jakarta is one of the world’s fastest-growing cities, today home to ten million; thanks to flooding and literal sinking, it could be entirely underwater as soon as 2050.”
― David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future

“as the world warmed again after the last glacial maximum and sea levels rose, the Bering land bridge once again disappeared beneath the waves. The connection between Alaska and Siberia was severed, and the Eastern and Western hemispheres were cut off from each other. Lasting contact was not made again between the peoples of the Old World and the New for another 16,000 years, until Columbus set foot on the Caribbean islands in 1492. Genetically similar, but living in different landscapes with access to different plants and animals, these two isolated populations of humanity formed civilisations independently from each other but remarkably similar in their domestication of crops and livestock and the development of agriculture.”
― Lewis Dartnell, Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History

“Nostalgia can have an intoxicating and powerful effect. Looking back through rose-tinted spectacles can create false pasts that cherry-pick only the very best, while ignoring the worst and the mundane. While harking back to a previous golden age often triggers warm memories of supposedly better times, the process can be deceptive, misleading and wrong. In fact, today’s world is better in almost every single way than the world of the past.”
― Peter Frankopan, The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World