Spring has sprung. More or less. It seems a bit uncertain at times, sneaking around and occasionally retreating in confusion. But its presence has been made known.
The smaller critters of the region have been waking up and doing their crittery things. Bees are buzzing, butterflies are flying, and flies are gathering together to conspire and plot the overthrow of the human race. The birds are starting to migrate back north again, stopping by on their way to visit our birdfeeders. The cats have been carefully preparing a fitting greeting. Casualties have been minimal so far, though, as Marshmallow hasn't yet learned that she can't pounce from a hundred feet away.
The world is starting to have a bit more green in it now, most of that being grass. A few of the trees are flowering nicely, as are the masses of forsythia along the creek in the backyard. Other flowers are being all flowery, too, such as the daffodils (probably one of my favourite Spring flowers, really, seeing as how they're all nice and bright and cheery), purple things the names of which I forget, and really tiny wildflowers of which nobody seems to have the slightest clue as to what they are. Catnip is coming up all over the yard, much to Abby's culinary delight.
Outside of town in the foresty bits of the mountains, the trees are still mostly leafless. And with all the trees being there, grass isn't much in evidence. So there isn't a whole lot of difference between the forest in early Spring and the forest on a snowless mid-Winter day. Unless you look closely. Closer still. There. The moss is going wild! It's a veritable microscopic orgy of sex and. . .ummm. . .asex. So remember, parents: don't let your children outside, 'cause that moss is everywhere. It will corrupt their squishy little minds.
There are other signs of Spring lurking in the forest, too. Flowers popping up in odd locations, for example. Or the merrily bubbling mountain streams, all full of water due to Spring showers and making nice little places to sit and picnic. The water looks very, very, very, very watery, too. And while this enormous shelf fungus wasn't looking very lively, the squirrel tail appearing in the same photo was most lively indeed. As, I assume, was the squirrel that I also assume was attached to said tail.
And now, for some geology! Yay!
The mountains hereabout are what are known, among other things, as karst topography. Slightly different from cursed topography, in that it contains a bit less unholy soul-sucking terror. This sort of landscape is caused by having the mountains made of harder rocks and softer rocks repeatedly layered one on the other. The softer ones erode away much more readily, leaving behind various formations. Sometimes there will be a central area of hard rock surrounded by soft rock; when the soft rock goes away, it leaves behind steep hills known locally as "knobs". When the rocks are much more mixed together, then the result is lots of weird caves, sinkholes, and other fun stuff. We also have lots of underground rivers, lakes, and springs.
Why is this region all karsty? About 400 million years ago, back around the Devonian period, these mountains were actually flat seabed under a shallow tropical sea. It probably would have been a nice place to go diving, if you didn't mind being eaten by the giant aquatic scorpions. The ocean water was full of dissolved minerals, and the critters living in it used the calcium in it to grow bones and shells and giant rocket-launching mecha. When these things died, the calcium crystals settled to the sea floor. Depending on various conditions such as pressure and exact composition, this would sometimes result in soft limestone and sometimes in harder shale. It is the shale that remains behind here, while the limestone gets worn away. So the mountains tend to be made up of layer after layer of left-behind shale, with lots of hollow spaces.
Obviously, mountains don't look much like a flat seabed. Due to all the fun and exciting movement of the ground, the shale and limestone layers have been squashed up like an accordian. And thus the layers are all tilted at weird angles, and end up with strange layered formations such as these:
Geology 1
Geology 2
Geology 3
Geology 4
Geology 5
Geology 6
Geology 7
Geology 8
This makes the mountains very, very crumbly. It also means that the rocks around here all tend to be some form of rectangle in shape, which makes using them to build walls nice and simple. It also also means that our local trees sometimes get to show off just how macho they are.
And that concludes this edition of this blog. Please be sure to turn in next time, whenever that may be, to see more examples of lots of letters combined into words. Unless they're not.
In conclusion, we leave you with this moment of zen: a cat practicing yoga.
*(Madness levels may vary. Check with your local Shoggoth for more details.)
Saturday, March 21, 2009
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