"Mountain building is not obvious.. "

 Certainly isn't .. (Hi Andrew).  [*Link death noted 20170919*.]  . 
( .. But what keeps making the Earth flatter (and smoother) than it used to be, is .. )

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"Building"? .... What is it about mountains that gets 'built'? If mountains are really eroded plateaus (link.) and volcanoes, why does the term ["mountain building"] pervade the literature so to describe these landforms?   [56,200 - 20170919]

Fig.  1.  Drakensberg Mountains, South Africa.   A classic example of the way in which rock layers of one sort and another are piled one on top of the other to build mountains. No? That's not how mountains are built? ..

(More? .. )  =>

house  malt  rat  cat  dog  cow  maiden  man  judge  rooster  farmer  hhh

View from Alice's Tardis

(20170706-24) :-

Gravity, and the relentless imperative of flatness.

AGNEW, WESTERN AUSTRALIA

Western Australia's experience of The Great Regression = the time when the inland seas and lakes ran of the land into the developing ocean basins leaving in their wake - The Agnew Pub, .. which according to legend has been there forever.

C&P to Google Earth search bar < -27.952608°, 120.393448° >















(Agnew, Western Australia) [Picture = Agnew pub.]


Compared are two erosional surfaces that developed over Archaean granites. Note the very pronounced incision that can result from very slight topographical differences.   One surface is flat-as-a-tack, and only slightly lateritic (duricrust; darker brown in the upper central part of the figure) developed as a veneer on eroded, partly intrusive granite that formed a basement to inselbergs of tightly folded 'greenstones' [marginally submarine lavas, chert, iron formation and shaly and arenaceous sediments.] which form low hills out of the frame.

 The other surface is the more recent drainage cutting into the underlying lighter-coloured saprolite. The land drops about thirty metres over the step of the breakaway and a further thirty metres in seven kilometres towards the lower boundary of the figure .  The Yellow Pin marks some highly degraded sand dunes of indeterminate age on the older surface (possibly even partly older than the younger drainage radiating off the high ground?).The breakaway offers a good profile through the saprolite.

Not quite sure though what to make of the topographical contrast as regards climate variability.  Laterite forms in tropical and subtropical climates implying high rainfall.  Very selective chemical weathering is reflected by stony and spongy laterites being almost exclusively developed only over the more iron-magnesium rich greenstones which in the general area rise little more than fifty metres over the granite plain and are virtually absent over the granite duricrust.  The flatness of this granite surface is remarkable and is distinctive in having virtually no drainage.

About 10-15m below this laterite surface and slightly out of the frame is another, characterised by very broad open drainage (Link).  Two lateritic surfaces therefore.  Three, if that over the greenstones is counted, and all of them being cannibalised by the younger erosion of the present active profile.

Both surfaces (counting the two laterite surfaces as one) reflect a climate that was much wetter than today.  Despite today's rains being quite heavy on occasion and very quickly forming a sheet of water over the flatter parts of the landscape when it does rain, I personally doubt whether they could have caused the erosion apparent, which would appear to me to be much more likely due to the waning phases of that sub-tropical climate represented by the laterite  - when Australia (and Antarctica) (and Africa) were located much further north (closer to India)  [An old landscape indeed.]

 By its continent-wide distribution and extreme flatness, the lateritic duricrust is a surface of virtually zero erosion potential, .. as close to 'beach' and sea-level as it almost possible to be.  Not the sea of today however, but the anastomosing epicontinental 'seas' and lakes that covered the land before the breakthrough of the mantle of the Southern Ocean, remnants of which remain in the southward-draining, ennervated lake /river system of today.  The lighter-coloured, more recent aggressive fluvial incisison represents further reduction in response to epeirogenic (continent-wide) 'uplift' of the land outwards from the core [drop in sea-level].


(The Agnew pub?   Just a blast from the past, ... Visit it before any planned vacation to Mars.

One for the Hillbuildies

 .. The footsoldiers of Plate Tectonics ..
( .. "..snoring away like Rip Van Winkel" .. )

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Even if midplate earthquakes are far less frequent than those on plate boundaries, if they have continued for any length of time they should have shoved up some hills."   (Shawna Vogel, p.165, "Naked Earth - The New Geophysics, 1996.

"Uhh?  ... Should have shoved up some hills.." ???

Well, ..why not?  Stands to reason, ...doesn't it?  Mountains can't just suddenly 'appear', .. ready-built, as it were, can they? They have to get pushed up by colliding plates, ...moving across the surface of the planet at the rate of centimetres a year.

That at least is the litany handed down by the Church of Plate Tectonics:  "Plates collide, crumple the crust and push up mountains."   So it's logical that before there are mountains there must be hills first.  (You have to laugh, ..little hills, .. sprouting like cabbages all over the place, ...getting pushed up and growing into mountains. If erosion doesn't get them first that is, and rub them all back down flat again.  In which case they would never get to be mountains. )

But (according to Plate Tectonics) they *do* get to be mountains.  Big ones, ..  Like the Himalayas.   The problem for Plate Tectonics however is that nowhere on the planet can anyone point to hills that are growing into mountains.


Read more ..

Truckies

(20170517)

Looking at things differently.

After a life of working (on and off) (mostly off) in the Australian bush I have an uneasy relationship with that particular example of natural environment.  The things that impress me most are the same things that (according to their diaries) impressed the early settlers who arrived on the beach in Western Australia in the early 1800's, culturally compromised by their pianos and the legacy of the mother country.  (Must've been tough.)  Those things are (and you can flick them on the fingers of one hand) :-  heat /flies/ dust /monotony and isolation.  Set them against the enervating monotony of the bush (arguably more grey than green), unrelenting blueness (sky&sun) and the fiery redness of the Earth and you get the picture of the heartland of Australia.  Nice, isn't it? (framed by the computer screen).  And it is too,  in winter.  Try it in 40-50 degree heat in the summer in 360 degree reality whichever way you look, while trying to catch a breath between every one of them.  (Any softness in it derives from relief from that experience of summer when it fries you!  Till you get used to it an any rate, and are thus prepared for the '"She'll be right, mate" signature statement of the Ozzie Cockie - the gate, (Bruce, I'll be bound)  [and the cocky ozzie with the ozzie cozzy) ("don't you wish your beaches looked a lot like mine"] .. held together by so many bit of wire it's like there's  more tumblers in it than the locks on the Bank of England.  Combine the heat, the gates and the language to go with both and you have the signature statement of white Australia colonisation.  (Why do I get this picture of the one-legged noble savage standing by, spear in hand, asking what we are doing?)

I can honestly say that any natural softness there is in it, of itself, lies (in my limited experience), in its indigenous people.  I find it odd, therefore, as to their choice of the sun (as "giver of life") as the centrepiece of their flag when surely water would would be more appropriate.   [I do struggle a bit with the sun (in the summer), giver of life or not.]

Flag.  As for the black (for the aboriginal nation)?   Something then about resilience and pride I guess.  But you know what they say about pride, so maybe we can settle for just some, and call it self-respect, but it's edgy, .. edgy.  Sounds to me the dominoes are a little bit round the wrong way in many things, particularly when one overshadows the other and refuses to budge.  Anyway, sun and water, .. we can split it, sun above, water below.  Or maybe left and right doesn't matter, .. surely both have to be in there somewhere as partners in this small matter of 'life' and its meaning in this big brown land - when it comes to nourishing little brown black grey green blue and white 'seeds'.] 


 Yet there *is* beauty in that harshness.  You see it more as you get older.  One I find is when you happen to be driving into the sun just after it has set.  Slivers of cloud just above the horizon divide the sky, .. 'sea' below, sky above, .. while further below the land darkens against encroaching night.  With a flip of the mind the road ahead changes.  The horizon shifts up into the sky, still ablaze in the wake of the sun to the fingers of cloud enclosing a tropical blue lagoon and a harbour of sorts.  You can almost see boats moored, .. or at least easily imagine them, while between the promontories of cloud lies the open sea, .. above the harbour the pink and gold of smaller clouds tinged with grey.

Now the road bends, taking you down to the sea.  The encroaching night and the heat of the day is behind you.  In front lies this glowing sheltered harbour of no ships,  no cranes,  no piles of containers, no gasworks, and no docklands of dystopian denizens. It's a rural fishing village, Mediterranean probably, an ideal in the mind's rosy glow of a simpler time. 

Funny how the mind switches like that to look at thinks differently.  It lasts for about fifteen /twenty minutes before you have to snap out of it and remember that the reality is still hundreds of miles away and night is falling, and you had better switch on lights and pay attention, .. but for a few minutes there is a window to a different reality. 

Truck drivers will know exactly what I mean. Maybe even wonder what it was was that pushed the aborigines away from that welcoming sunset coast and made them wandering souls in the crispy conurbations of bushy vicissitudes.  And the Innuit people of northern climes, pushed likewise into the icy wilderness where Frankenstein and the monster he created perished, abandoned and homeless on the altar of a "young girl's hideous imagination" that every year peeves schoolchildren who have to do it (so they do English rite).   Or for that matter the Wandering Tribes of Israel in the Arabian desert, whose bloodthirsty genocidal family history became the touchstone of  the civilised western world - a bounty that spawned the diasporean Scottish deal-maker, Donald-the-Trump who has invoked those ill-fated perambulations of Middle-Eastern folk (religious? - or just tribal) as a means of exorcising his curse of compulsive electioneering, but alas appears to have been scotched in his plan by the unravelling of his not-so secret dealings with that other card in the pack, Vlad-the-Putin, .. known for the boot when he's not impaling his political foes on poisonous chemicals of one sort or another (Link added) - and pallying up to birds of feathers similar to himself. 

All of which is to say that 'truckies' and different ways of looking at things (or not), the more things change, the more they stay they same.  'Twas ever thus.

An experience in virtual reality

[From the archives]
Tuesday (20160801)


I had one yesterday when I went up to the park.  Don't rightly know what to call it.  Amusing? .. Surprising? .. Puzzling?  Discombobulating certainly. The footpath was packed with people. This is a pic from google images, probably on a weekend, but not so different in impact. How come[?] on a Monday, about 1pm. "Something's going on here," I thought. "Monday isn't a day people flock to the park." Moreover there were no kids, or oldies that could be identified as 'parents, or (more likely being a Monday), grandparents. These were all people in their teens, twenties, and some obviously in their thirties. The weird thing was the way they were all standing about like at some meet, .. sort of moving on the spot, or drifting aimlessly, like stalks of seaweed in underwater camera view. Well there they were, .. all staring at their mobile phones. What's going on? Nobody's actually walking, or strolling in any purposeful way. Just sort of 'being' there.

Then (reality check) it hit me. Don't tell me! (It had been in the news.) Pokemon Go.

Then I had the ^%$^%# !! experience.

"Wha'.. the F^%* !! "

These were grown-ups. 'Pokemon', as I understand it from finding out, is something like collecting number plates on cars, or train names, or footballers from breakfast cereal packets. [Trains, .. Ah, .. what a blow that was to a nine-year-old when these terrifying, rushing, hissing, belching monsters spitting cinders and setting the grass on fire on hot summer days were taken out of service and went diesel, then electric.]

 But still, nine-year-olds versus adults. Why weren't they at work or where/whatever they were supposed to be doing (on a Monday)? (Chasing little virtual cut-outs around indeed? Is somebody pulling my leg? (Another reality check - How much does it cost to play this "game"?) Is this how people "connect" these days? The adult version of collecting cards of footy players? Is this what you get from eating vegemite? At least when you were nine you had to actually make some sort of a "You show me yours and I'll show you mine" transaction, and actually talk to people; maybe even recruit a third to see if their collection could help. I didn't see anybody talking, or doing anything that looked like making a swap. No point I guess, if everybody already has all the 'cards'. So what exactly is the point? I mean other than to test how best to co-opt people's attention. First the hardware, then the software. Yes, I know it's a bit, .. (of me), .. but if this is not a cause for concern over the malleable simplicity of simple people's simple minds, then I don't know what is, .. because it's not only demonstrating what can be done, it's revealing the substrate on which it's doing it.

 Not long ago Google got complaints for changing the lettering on its search page to make it look like a three-year-old's colouring book, and there are increasing comments generally around 'infantilising the public space'. It can't be infantilised, if the potential for infantilisation is not there. Ergo, ..

We've already had a week recently of reminiscing 'Playschool' on public radio in adult prime time, then followed by a week of broadcasts on pokemon, and now (also in the last couple of weeks) (on public radio), 'up-speak' is catching on. Again. Upspeak (/uptalk), .. also known as valley-girl talk, Doesn't it piss you off? It's almost as bad as the craze among yesterday's upper school and university students, of speaking like teletubbies. Sadly for some and annoyingly for many this has left its legacy, particularly among many professional women whose need for security and belonging has proved to be unshakeable.. And not least (and certainly not last), is the detestable proliferation of "vocal fry" - sizzling the vocatives in bacon fat, when they're not being snorted down nasal passages like turkey-gobble. All revealing the nature and the power of social connectors, the age group of their appeal, and what this reveals for the way society is headed. With the score equal at half time (after 2,000+ years) will religion make a come back? .. or will it succumb to the greater power of infancy, as, ..nappies trailing, .. yesterday's cohorts make it into the snuff of old age.

The problem is (in my view) about all of this 'child education' stuff, if you reflect the child back to them on their own terms, peppering it with baby-speak, then that's what you get in the transition to the adult world (teletubbies, bananas in pyjamas etc), .. with some never to make it.  Can't blame them (for standing around like seaweed) (looking at the 'abacus' in front of them - trying to work out what it's all about). It's exactly the same with religion, reflect back to people their own Pride and Prejudice (and fears), and you have them in the palm of your hand. It's the salesman's golden rule; find out something about you and work it so you 'identify'.

Who among us has never been 'souled'?

 [Ho no, .. you'd never catch *me* with *that* one!]

 Religion, ..organised religion, .. is ignorance dressed to the nines with official significations [1] [2] in case people don't get it, .. that it is *power* - enormous power. Born by warrant and the innocence of people it eventually draws to itself the authority to suck their blood in some cosmic sociopathic gyre, eventually presiding over them like some genie, until, held by their common bond (that must not be broken) they find themselves in subjugation, fealty and fear. ("One Ring to rule them all..") ("Kiss it.") [Pope F. seems to be breaking the mold though. Good.]

 A bit strong? Not if you lived five hundred years ago before there was separation of Church and State over 'here', or at the present day over 'there' (where there isn't any).

Here's Len again, with his take on it. [Since Len, protests have caught on a bit, but not a lot.]  I think the idiosyncrasies he's talking about is what musicians would call a 'hook', and it derives from the tribalism of the schoolyard (particularly girls') [Len's right there, about this tribalism being a 'girl' thing, and related to lack of confidence in many cases, but more than that to a need to belong ] but hang in for his last point, he's not so far wrong - in time we'll all be hopping and bopping (or swaying like seaweed) to the same app., with as much confidence as the 'in-your-face' mobile phone you're looking at gives you (however much that might be) which is not a lot, as far as I can see, from the number of people with their heads down, buried in it 24/7).

 ["Lack of confidence" indeed. There's too much (empty) confidence going around, if you ask me. which is why there's all this teletubby-speak, upspeak, and world-weary groaning-speech trying to make an impression. Speech used to be a very powerful means of communication, now all the communication of value is carried in how, not what, (it) is said ("like", .. innit?)

Gotta go. (You got this far?) (Can't be so wide of the mark then.)

 [Hang in for the mark of the Never-Ending Stowee.]

 "Ï'll be back."

 [I see in this update some of the more impressive pictures are either not making it to Google's search, or have been removed.  Read More? ]

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Connecting links  (=> "The Great Regression ")
Globalisation and 'being sold'  ("Sneaker Culture has arrived!")
The increasing infantilisation of popular culture => [1] [2]
(Define who you are by your tatts, studs, and bovver boots.)
[Globalisation (good listen) ]
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