Thursday, August 24, 2017

Orogeny recapitulates porphyry

Ah, research.

I'm into the "less research, dammit" part of the story. I'm skipping any rest stops, roadside attractions, or other touristing as I send my cast down the interstate and to the final location of the book.

All I wanted was a couple of words. Like "the red sandstones had been left behind for a muted, depressing yellow-ochre." Or something like that. But...what color is the area I'm traveling through?

Not a simple question. I'm thirty tabs deep now on the geology of the Colorado Plateau (of which the San Rafael Swell through which I-70 passes is part of), the various layers of Jurassic, Cretaceous, and earlier materials, the weathered remains of an anticline formed 60-80 MYA, the leaching of iron from exposed Navajo Sandstone, the unique endemic species, etc. etc.

I'm no geologist. In times past I had the illusion it might be possible to do world-building from the mantle out, to figure out the underlying geology and work all the way out to rain shadows and micro-climates. Well, the US is so damned geologically complex it is essentially beyond me to grasp enough of it to be able to paint the kind of broad strokes the template sentence above implies.

Still: the question of what central Utah looks like fails most of my tests; there is no kind of reproducible behavior involved, it ties into no politicized argument of which I am aware, is in short a completely neutral issue. I could say it was bright pink and filled with unicorn farts and it would only reflect on my willingness to do the research.

Yeah, but you see...it's fun to read up on the geology. And, yeah -- how else would I find that the Planetary Society set up a station because parts of the swell are similar to the landscapes of Mars?


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