If someone were to ask if I wanted to have eternal life, my answer would be a clear NO and a clear YES at the same time. As human beings — because of our souls, our feelings, and our attachments — immortality would be unbearable suffering! However, the world is magically complex and infinitely diverse, and the human mind regarding time and space, always finds more and more miracles in it, more and more to know. For one who feels this way, the moment when the opportunities for learning cease and the world goes on without him is probably twice as difficult.

There are many billions of years behind us in the universe, when we were nowhere, and there are a few million in which we humans have been involved. In that particular book, which Mór Jókai writes about at the beginning of the Black Diamonds (1870), that is, in the “crust of the earth”, which has “real pages” (layers), perhaps a few page could be already dedicated to humans. Although we take up little space in this “History of the Earth,” we have the ability to read not only the passages about us, but far, far more. The aim of the Tertiary & Quaternary Strata is nothing less than to help researchers of the present and the future directly, quickly and effectively “read” and give information about the chapters that tell the story of the last 66 million years here in the Carpathian/Pannonian Basin.

Why is the Herman Ottó Museum in Miskolc trying to take on the above-mentioned goal, which may seem too bold? The answer, at least for me, is obvious! “Because the opportunity is there” since July 2007, as Mount Everest before George Mallory (1886–1924), to raise the cultivation of earth sciences to a higher level in Miskolc, the city with one of the most diverse natural and geological environments in Hungary. The discovery of the fossil forest in Bükkábrány thirteen years ago and, as a result, the opening of the hugely successful exhibition building, the “Pannon Sea Museum”, is not just a lottery win in the life of our museum. We have a duty, which we have already believed in when we established the Repository of Geological and Natural History in 2012. The extraction of knowledge from the collection, which we are constantly enriching, is a primary goal and it must be published on several levels, first and foremost for professionals. Of course, the young generation emerging in our institution must appear in other publications as well, but the mission of the Tertiary & Quaternary Strata is to attract, with its speed and reliability, doctoral students and professionals, studying and working at other research facilities, and their scientific results directly to the collection in Miskolc.

Let’s try to read Jókai’s “real pages” of our Earth together with the help of the Tertiary & Quaternary Strata!

Péter Szolyák PhD
founder, chief editor