The Wonder of Water Quotes

“has protected the Earth from long-term temperature deviations over billions of years and preserved the oceans. This clever, elegant negative feedback regulatory system controls the world temperature by regulating the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere through the weathering of silicate rocks.31”
― Michael Denton, The Wonder of Water: Water's Profound Fitness for Life on Earth and Mankind

“What factors have preserved the world’s ocean and the Earth’s temperature—two strands of what are an inseparable braid—in the ambient range over time-spans beyond any ordinary human understanding?”
― Michael Denton, The Wonder of Water: Water's Profound Fitness for Life on Earth and Mankind

“An intriguing aspect of the causal sequence exhibited in the tectonic system is that the subsystems that keep the whole causal chain moving are reciprocally self-formative.”
― Michael Denton, The Wonder of Water: Water's Profound Fitness for Life on Earth and Mankind

“the fluid so fit to form the matrix of carbon-based cellular life (Chapter 7) and for mammalian physiology (Chapter 6) should also be fit to create the necessary global environmental conditions that carbon-based life forms need to thrive.”
― Michael Denton, The Wonder of Water: Water's Profound Fitness for Life on Earth and Mankind

“The movement of ice over the ground in most temperate glaciers is enhanced by a process known as basal sliding.”
― Michael Denton, The Wonder of Water: Water's Profound Fitness for Life on Earth and Mankind

“Yet after each dramatic departure, the Earth’s “equipoise” has always recovered and the climate restored to normal. As Bjornerud puts it, “Earth has had fevers and chills but has suffered no malady so extreme that its climatic immune system could not ultimately overcome it.”30”
― Michael Denton, The Wonder of Water: Water's Profound Fitness for Life on Earth and Mankind