Some miles along the interstate, when we crossed the Blacks Fork River, we would see alkali deposits lying in the floodplain like dried white scum. On both sides of the road were abandoned farmhouses, abandoned barns, their darkly weathered boards warping away from empty structures out of plumb. The river precipitates and the abandoned farms were not unrelated. This was the Lyman irrigation project, Love explained-a conception of the Bureau of Reclamation, an attempt to make southwestern Wyoming competitive with Wisconsin. The Blacks Fork River was dammed in i971, and its waters were used to soak the land. The land became whiter than a bleached femur. It still appeared to be covered with light snow. “Alkali sours the land,” Love said. “The drainage here is just too poor to flush it out. Imagine the sodium those farmers drank in their water.” Meanwhile, west of Green River, a tall incongruous chimney zakelijke energie vergelijken seemed to rise up out of the range, streaming a white plume downwind. Below the chimney, but hidden by the roll of the land, was a trona refinery, and, below the refinery, a mine. I had gone down into it one winter day half a. dozen months before, and I now remarked that the people there had told me that the white cloud issuing from the chimney was pure steam. “It goes clear across the state,” Love said. “That’s pretty durable for steam.” He said that fluorine, among other things, was coming out of the refinery with the steam. Settling downwind, it could cause fluorosis. He thought it might be damaging forests in the Wind River Range. The afternoon sky was cloudless but not exactly clear. “The haze you see is the trona haze that goes across Wyoming,” he continued. “We never used to have this. You could clearly see distant mountains on any average day.” Trana is about as hard as a fingernail, and much of it looks like maple sugar or honey-colored butter crunch. I remembered drinking coffee at a picnic table nine hundred feet below us, in a twilighted Kafkan dusty world where dynamite provoked reverberate thunders that zakelijke energie moved from room to room and eventually clapped themselves. Chain saws with bars ten feet long sliced into the rock to define the next blast. Stickers on lunch pails said.

He tested them-and ocean rises and trenches as well-against the laws of geometry for the motions of rigid segments of a sphere. At the i967 meeting of the American Geophysical Union, he was scheduled to deliver a paper on the Puerto Rico Trench. When the day came, he got up and said he was not going to deal with that topic. Instead, reading the paper he called “Rises, Trenches, Great Faults, and Crustal Blocks,” he revealed to the geological profession the existence of plate tectonics. What he was saying was compressed in his title. He was saying that the plates are rigid-that they do not internally deform-and he was identifying rises, trenches, and great faults as the three kinds of plate boundaries. Subsequently, he worked out plate zakelijke energie motions: the variations of direction and speed that have resulted in exceptional scenery. It was about a decade later when Morgan’s Princeton colleague Ken Deffeyes asked him what he could possibly do as an encore, and Morgan-who is shy and speaks softly in accents that faintly echo his youth in Savannah, Georgia-answered with a shrug and a smile, “I don’t know. Prove it wrong, I guess.” Instead, he developed an interest in hot spots and the thermal plumes that are thought to connect their obscure roots in the mantle with their surface manifestations-a theory that would harvest many of the questions raised or bypassed by plate tectonics, and similarly collect in one story numerous disparate phenomena. In i937, an oceanographic vessel called Great Meteor, using a newly invented depth finder, discovered under the North Atlantic a massif that stood seventeen thousand feet above the neighboring abyssal plains. It was fifteen hundred miles west of Casablanca. No one in those days could begin to guess at the origins of such a thing. They could only describe it, and name it Great Meteor Seamount. Today, Jason Morgan, with other hot-spot theorists, is prepared not only to suggest its general origin but to indicate what part of the world has lain above it at any point in time across two hundred million years. Roughly that long ago, they place Great Meteor under the district of zakelijke energie vergelijken Keewaytin, in the Northwest Territories of Canada, about halfWay between Port Radium and Repulse Bay. That the present Great Meteor Seamount was created by a hot spot seems evident from the size and configuration of its base, which is about eight hundred kilometres wide and closely matches the domal base of Hawaii and numerous other hot spots.

In the Teton landscape are forms of motion that would not be apparent in a motion picture. Features of the valley are cryptic, paradoxical, and bizarre. In i983, divers went down into Jenny Lake, at the base of the Grand Teton, and reported a pair of Engelmann spruce, rooted in the lake bottom, standing upright, enclosed in eighty feet of water. Spread Creek, emerging from the Mt. Leidy Highlands, is called Spread Creek because it has two mouths, which is about as common among creeks as it is among human beings. They are three miles apart. Another tributary stream is lower than the master river. Called Fish Creek, it steals along the mountain base. Meanwhile, at elevations as much as fifteen feet higher-and with flood-control zakelijke energie vergelijken levees to keep the water from spilling sidewaysdown the middle of the valley flows the Snake. One year, with David Love, I made a field trip that included the Beartooth Mountains, the Yellowstone Plateau, the Hebgen earthquake zone of the Madison River, the Island Park Caldera, and parts of the Snake River Plain. Near the end of the journey, we came over Teton Pass and looked down into Jackson Hole. In a tone of sudden refreshment, he said, “Now, there is a place for a kid to cut his eyeteeth on dynamic geology.” Among others, he was referring to himself. He rode into the valley in the summer of ‘3+ Aged twenty-one, he set up a base camp, and went off to work in the mountains. There were a number of small lakes among the Tetons at altitudes up to ten thousand five hundred feet-Cirque Lake, Mink Lake, Grizzly Bear Lake, IceRoe Lake, Snowdrift Lake, Lake Solitude-and no one knew how deep they were or how much water they might contain. The Wyoming Geological Survey wanted to know, and had offered him a summer job and a collapsible boat. He climbed the Tetons, and rowed the lakes, like Thoreau sounding depths on Walden Pond. He likes to say that the first time he was ever seasick was above timberline. If the Teton peaks were like the Alps-a transplanted segment of the Pennine Alps-there was the huge difference that just up the road from the Pennine Alps there are no geyser basins, boiling springs, bubbling muds, or lavas that froze in human time. His base camp zakelijke energie was on Signal Mountain-by Teton standards, a hill-rising from the valley Boor a thousand feet above Jackson Lake. More than fifty summers later, one day on Signal Mountain he said, ‘When I was a pup, I used to come up here to get away from it all.”

Muskrat Creek was . the second homestead on which John Love had filed in Wyoming. The first-thirty miles away-was in the Big Sand Draw, where the grass was inadequate, the snows were exceptionally deep, and the water was marginally potable. In i897, he collapsed his umbrella and moved. At Muskrat Creek, long before he bought the stagecoach towns, he lived in an earth dugout roofed with pine poles and clay. It was warm in winter, cool in summer, and danker than Scotland all year round. He was prepared to run risks. In Lander, sixty miles west, he made an extraordinary bet with a bank, whose assets included a number of thousands of sheep. John Love bet that he could take them for a summer and return them in the fall, fatter on the average by at least ten pounds. If he succeeded, he would be paid zakelijke energie vergelijken handsomely. If he failed, he would receive a scant wage. He was taking a chance on the weather, because a bad storm could wipe out the flock. By November, the sheep were as round as poker chips, ready to be cashed in. Leaving them in the care of a herder, he rode to Thermopolis, where he made a down payment on a flock of his own. The conditions of the deal were rigid: the rest of the money was to be paid in seven days or the deposit was forfeit and the animals, too. Within the week, he would have to return to his fattened sheep, move them to Lander, collect his money, and return to Thermopolis-a round trip of two hundred and fifty miles.
The sky over Thermopolis was dark with snowcloud. In his bearskin cap, his bearskin coat, his fleece-lined leather chaps, he saddled up Big Red-Big Red, whose life had begun somewhere in the Red Desert in 1888, a wild horse. The blizzard began as horse and rider were climbing the Owl Creek Mountains. Through steep terrain that would have been hazardous in warm clear weather, they felt their way in whiteouts and darkness, in wind-chill factors greater than fifty below zero. Covering about six miles an hour, they reached the herd in twenty-one hours, and almost immediately began the gingerly walk to Lander, conserving the animals’ weight. John won zakelijke energie his bet, got back on Big Red, and flew across the mountains with the money. He and the horse beat the deadline. He collected his ewes, took them home, and bred them. In seven days, he had, among other things, set himself forward one year. By 1910, when he married Miss Waxham, he owned more than eleven thousand sheep and hundreds of cattle and horses-a fortune in livestock which today would be valued at roughly five million dollars.

We moved off the gangplank and into a highway throughcut of pink granite. Love said, “Now we are on the mountain, on the Precambrian core. You have to watch closely. This fantastic geology is subtle. I-80 was not built to show it off but to take advantage of its beneficences.” There were more pink granite cuts and also some dark, shattered amphibolite that had been the country rock into which the granite intruded i.4 billion years ago. The interstate had sliced through a section where the bright-pink granite. and the charcoal-gray amphibolite met. It was as if a wall painter had changed colors there. The dark rock was full of fracture planes zakelijke energie and cleavage planes. “That rock probably had been messed around for a long time before the granite came,” Love said. “It could be two, three billion years old. We don’t know.” As our altitude increased, the granite roadcuts became deeper and higher and seemingly more rutilant. The rock was competent. There were no benches, and the cuts were as much as fifty metres high. Resembling marbled steak, they were shot through with veins of quartz, where, long after the granite formed, it cracked and quartz filled it in. The walls were indented with vertical parallel grooves, like giant wormtrails in some exotic sediment. These were actually fossil shot holes and unloaded guide holes from the process of presplitting. The highway builders drilled the holes and then dynamited one of three. In this manner, they-and we-reached eight thousand six hundred and forty feet, the highest point on Interstate 80 between the Atlantic and the Pacific. What appeared to be the head of a chicken sat at the top of a big granite block, as if it had been zakelijke energie vergelijken chopped off there. Only when we drew close did I glance up and see that it was Abraham Lincoln. It was, in fact, an artful likeness, resting on an outsized plinth. Years ago, this had been the summit of the Lincoln Highway, which was now incorporated in its substance, if not in its novel spirit, into the innards of the interstate.

A geologist who grew up in Wyoming-with its volcanic activity, its mountains eroding, and its basins receiving sediment-would inherently comprehend the cycles of the earth: geology repeating itself as people watch. G. K. Gilbert, tl1e first Chief Geologist of the United States Geological Survey, once remarked that it is “the natural and legitimate ambition of a properly constituted geologist to zakelijke energie vergelijken see a glacier, witness an eruption and feel an earthquake.” A geologist could do all that as a child in Wyoming, and not have to look far for more.
Miss Waxham’s school was a log cabin on Twin Creek near the mouth of Skull Gulch, a mile from the Mills ranch. Students came from much greater distances, even through deep snow. Many mornings, ink was frozen in the inkwells, and the day began with ink-thawing, followed by reading, spelling, chemistry, and civil government. Sometimes snow blew through the walls, forming drifts in the schoolroom. Water was carried from the creek-drawn from a hole that was chopped in the ice. If the creek was frozen to the bottom, the students melted snow. Their school was fourteen by sixteen feet-smaller than a bathroom at Wellesley. The door was perforated with bullet holes from “some passerby’s six-shooter.” Over the ceiling poles were old gunnysacks and overalls, to prevent the sod roof from shedding sediment on the students. Often, however, the zakelijke energie air sparkled with descending dust, struck by sunlight coming in through the windows, which were all in the south wall. There was a table and chair for Miss Waxham, and eight desks for her pupils. Miss Waxham’s job was to deliver a hundred per cent of the formal education available in District Eleven, Fremont County, Wyoming.

The theory of continental glaciation seems less prone to grand revision. The sun itself seems as likely to be banished from the center of the solar system as the ice from the Pleistocene continents. The ice made Lake Seneca, Lake Cayuga-all the so-called Finger Lakes, of western New Yorkcutting them into stream valleys in exactly the manner in which it cut the fjords of Patagonia, the fjords of Norway, Alaska, and Maine.
After the ice quarried the huge quantities of kantoor huren per uur amsterdam Canadian rock that it dumped in the United States, it melted back and filled the quarries with new Canadian lakes-hundreds of thousands of Canadian lakes. A sixth of all the fresh water on earth is in Canadian ponds, Canadian streams, Canadian rivers, Canadian lakes. In Greenland, Antarctica, and elsewhere, a much greater quantity of fresh water-four times as much-is still imprisoned as ice, leaving precious little fresh water for the rest of tl1e world. Our Epoque Glaciaire has by now been illuminated by a century and a half of expanded research. Glacial outwash has been identified at the mouth of tlrn Mississippi, six hundred miles from the terminal moraine-a suggestion of the power and the volume of the rivers that melted from the ice. Where the land tilted north and the meltwaters pooled against the glacial front-and where waters were trapped between moraines and retreating ice-gargantuan lakes formed, such as Glacial Lake Maumee, the one of which Lake Erie is all that remains. Lake Michigan is all kantoor huren per uur rotterdam that remains of Glacial Lake Chicago. Lake Ontario is all that remains of Glacial Lake Iroquois. Lake Winnipeg, Lake Manitoba, the Lake of the Woods are among the remains of a glacial lake whose bed and terraces, stream deltas and wave-cut shores reach seven hundred miles across Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario, and down into the United States as far as Milbank, South Dakota. With the exception of the Caspian Sea, this one was larger than any lake of the modem world. It was the supreme lake of the American Pleistocene-Glacial Lake Agassiz.

The rock was now Pennsylvanian-massive river sandstones of Pennsylvanian time. Flat, deck-like, it was comparatively undisturbed. It had been shed, to be sure, from eastern mountains, but had not been much affected by their compressive drive. Crazed streams had disassembled the plateau, leaving half-eaten wedding cakes, failed pyramids, oddly polygonal hair-covered hills. Pittsburgh was built upon such geometries, its streets and roads faithful to the schizophrenic streams, its hills separating its people into socio-racial ethno-religious piles-up this one the co-working space amsterdam snobs, up that the Jews, up this the tired, up that the poor. A hundred miles northeast of Pittsburgh in the Hurrying snow there were numerous roadcuts now, and in them were upward-fining sequences of sandstones, siltstones, shales-Allegheny black shales -underlying more levels of sandstone, siltstone, and shale. “If you were a prospector for coal, you’d go bananas when you saw these black shales,” Anita said. “There ought to be coal in these roadcuts. This is Pennsylvania in the Pennsylvanian-the home office of the rock.” Pennsylvania in the Pennsylvanian was jungle-a few degrees from the equator, like southern Indonesia and Guadalcanal. The freshwater swamp forests stood beside the nervously changing coastline of a saltwater bay, just as Sumatran swamps now stand beside the Straits of Malacca, and Bornean everglades beside the Java Sea. This was when glacial cycles elsewhere in the world were causing sea level to oscillate with geologic rapidity, and the swamps pursued the shoreline as the sea went down, and marine limestone buried the swamps as the sea returned. In just one of these cycles, the shoreline would move as much as five hundred miles-the sea transgressing and co-working space rotterdam regressing through most of Pennsylvania and Ohio. There were so many such cycles at close intervals in Pennsylvanian time that Pennsylvanian rock sequences are often striped like regimental ties-the signature of glaciers half the world away. They existed three hundred million years ago, and glacial patterns of that kind have not been repeated until now, when the measure of our own brief visit to the earth is being recorded as a paper-thin stripe in time.

By the nineteen-seventies, what Behre had loosely described was widely believed to be the impact of one continent colliding with another, as Iapetus, tl1e proto-Atlantic ocean, was closed and the suture of the two continents became the spine of the Appalachians. The successive pulses of orogeny-Taconic, Acadian, Alleghenianwere attributed to the irregular shapes of shelves and coastlines of the continents. Where they bulged, the action would have an early date, and especially where some cape, point, or peninsula had a similar feature coming from the opposite side. Such co-working space leeuwarden headlands, in advance contact, were said to have produced the Taconic Orogeny. Great bays, eventually coming against one another, set off the Acadian Orogeny. The Alleghenian Orogeny was the final crunching scrum, completing the collision. The apparent suture was a line running through Brevard, North Carolina, more or less connecting Atlanta, Asheville, and Roanoke, not to mention Africa and America. The Martinsburg seafloor and the underlying carbonate rocks had unquestionably been broken into thrust sheets and shuffled like cards. Uplifted with their Precambrian basement, they had, in perfect harmony with the Old Geology, become mountains that shed their sediments-shed their elastic wedges-and buried the Martinsburg deep enough to turn it into slate, buried the carbonates deep enough to turn them into marble. Thus, plate tectonics fit. Plate tectonics may have restyled the orogeny and dilapidated the geosyncline, but it fit the classical evidence. There were, to be sure, certain anomalies, which suggested further study. If the Brevard Zone was the suture, how come it was so short? It was evident co-working space zwolle for a hundred miles, dubious for a few hundred more, and nonexistent after that. If the Taconic, Acadian, and Alleghenian orogenies were subdivisional impacts of a single intercontinental collision, how come they took so long? In plate-tectonic theory, plates move at differing speeds, the average being two inches a year.