Skip to content

Clear Quote by John McPhee

“When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the…” quote by John McPhee
Download Open image
“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 turned 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.”

John McPhee

2.4 out of 5 (10 ratings)

More by John McPhee

Explore all 57 John McPhee quotes

More Clear quotes

Browse all 7,317 Clear quotes