Basin and Range
John McPhee
Language: English
Pages: 240
ISBN: 0374516901
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The first of John McPhee's works in his series on geology and geologists, Basin and Range is a book of journeys through ancient terrains, always in juxtaposition with travels in the modern world―a history of vanished landscapes, enhanced by the histories of people who bring them to light. The title refers to the physiographic province of the United States that reaches from eastern Utah to eastern California, a silent world of austere beauty, of hundreds of discrete high mountain ranges that are green with junipers and often white with snow. The terrain becomes the setting for a lyrical evocation of the science of geology, with important digressions into the plate-tectonics revolution and the history of the geologic time scale.
1915, opened like a zipper far up the valley, and, exploding into the silence, tore along the mountain base for upward of twenty miles with a sound that suggested a runaway locomotive. “This is the sort of place where you really do not put a nuclear plant,” says Deffeyes. “There was other action in the neighborhood at the same time—in the Stillwater Range, the Sonoma Range, Pumpernickel Valley. Actually, this is not a particularly spectacular scarp. The lesson is that the whole thing—the whole
Brine shrimp, which do live there, die by the millions from the shock.” I have seen the salt lake incredibly beautiful in winter dusk under snow-streamer curtains of cloud moving fast through the sky, with the wall of the Wasatch a deep rose and the lake islands rising from what seemed to be rippled slate. All of that was now implied by the mysterious shapes in the foreshortening snow. I didn’t mind the snow. One June day, moreover, with Karen Kleinspehn—on her way west for summer field work—I
intersect the North Sea—that helped to bring the history of the earth, as people had understood it, out of theological metaphor and into the perspectives of actual time. This happened toward the end of the eighteenth century, signalling a revolution that would be quieter, slower, and of another order than the ones that were contemporary in America and France. According to conventional wisdom at the time, the earth was between five thousand and six thousand years old. An Irish archbishop (James
seemed to be steaming, vapors rising from warm ponds and hot springs. The roadcut was long, high, and benched. It was sandstone, for the most part, but at its lower, westernmost end the blasting had exposed a dark shale that had been much deformed and somewhat metamorphosed, the once even bedding now wrinkled and mashed—rock folded up like wet laundry. “You can spend hours doping out one of these shattered places, just milling around trying to find out what’s going on,” Deffeyes said cautiously,
the profile of the bottom. The ridge-axis rock, when he dredged it up, was extremely young. But what in the end interested Deffeyes at least as much was the benthic profile that had been traced by the stylus of the sounder. The profile of the spreading center in the ocean bottom off Oregon seemed remarkably familiar to someone who had done his thesis field work in Nevada. It appeared to be, in miniature, a cross section of the Basin and Range. The new crust, spreading out, had broken into fault