Geological Reflections
                                       
   by

Robert M. Langdon

   [*!* Images 4 Pictures] [Map]

   ABOVE:

   Approaching Jackson Hole and the Grand Teton range from the E: looking
   S towards the Great Salt Lake in late afternoon from 39,000 ft. (9/78)

   BELOW:

   The main wall of the Rockies in NW Montana: looking N towards Glacier
   Park (US) and Waterton Park (Canadian Rockies) from 37,000 ft.

   I grew up on the high plains of Colorado at the foot of the Rocky
   Mountains. This land is so arid that the prairies are almost desert in
   nature. It is doubtful that, in the 1920s, many people had ever
   tramped around them extensively. I spent a lot of time wandering
   around areas out there which looked as though no one had ever passed
   by but me, the coyotes and the rattlesnakes. Two of things that
   impressed me at that age were (1) the stratification of the land as it
   was exposed in the arroyos and gorges and (2) the carpet of small,
   round, dark red stones - literally thousands and thousands of them,
   ranging from tiny peas to as much as an inch in diameter. My elders
   told me that the strata were layers of limestone - the little skeleton
   bit at the bottom on long-ago oceans - and the pebbles were
   meteorites. This, of course, was not much explanation, but it sufficed
   for the time. It didn't explain how those oceans got up to 5,000 feet,
   where I was standing, or the mountains rising another 5,000 feet just
   to the west, and it didn't explain where the meteorites came from; so
   I was left wandering about all that.

   Next, of course, I wondered why the sun was hot, and the story in the
   ' 30s was that it was burning hydrogen - and I knew by then that
   hydrogen burned with oxygen and made water, and I thought, there must
   be a hell of a lot of water around somewhere, and where did the oxygen
   and hydrogen come from.

   Those were the days when it was generally believed that we knew just
   about everything about everything, except for maybe a little of this
   and that around the edges, and that John Maynard Keynes had shown us
   the way out of the depression into eternal prosperity.

   In the summer of 1936, when I was 16, I got a job rip-rapping a bend
   in the small river out west of town. To get the stone for the rip-rap,
   we went up on the bluff above the river - maybe 200 feet - and scraped
   away an overlay of about a foot of dusty clay to expose a layer of
   limestone about 18 inches thick. This layer was flat on top and
   bottom, of uniform thickness, and seemed to extend for miles along the
   bluffs above the river and miles north until it was exposed again at
   the next stream gorge. We would drive a 4-foot crowbar under the
   layer, stick in two or three sticks of dynamite, and blow enough
   cracks to make a few loads of rip-rap. The next layer down was a flat,
   hard-packed layer of the same dusty dry clay as the original overlay.
   So, I had to wonder how that could have come about, the little
   skeleton-drifting-down bit just didn't seem to fit what I was looking
   at.

   Later, I went to live in Salt Lake City and fly over the Rockies, the
   Sierras, the Cascades, and that enormous arid desert extending from
   the Canadian border down into Mexico.

   Before discussing this area, let me diverge to the big island of the
   Hawaiian group, also called Hawaii. This island is the only one of the
   chain which is still actively volcanic. The island chain sits squarely
   in the wet northeast trade-winds. As a result of the winds and their
   effect on the islands' mountains, the northeast sides of the islands
   are favoured with immense amounts of rain - the peak on the north
   island, Kanuai, is the wettest place on earth - and the southwest
   sides are almost arid, receiving rain only during the winter months
   when the trade-winds slack off and "Kona" storms come in from the
   other direction. There is a perimeter highway around the big island;
   it crosses many old lava flows. The state of Hawaii has placed signs
   on each of these flows indicating the year of the flow. It is most
   astonishing how quickly, on the wet side, the lava flows begin to
   break down into soil which will support plant life, and how slowly
   this occurs on the arid side. Very old flows on the dry side look much
   fresher or younger than much more recent flows on the wet side.

   Now, back to the mainland. The western mountain chains of the Sierra
   Nevada and the Cascades effectively squeeze out almost all the
   moisture from the Pacific Ocean as it flows in on the Prevailing
   Westerlies. The vast inland plateau, ranging around 4,000 feet above
   sea level, gets very little rain or snow, ever. Therefore, the
   breakdown of the formations proceeds at a slow rate, and the lack of
   plant life of any luxuriant extent allows the basic surface features
   of the land to be visible, especially from the air.

   All through the area there are great black blotches on the land -
   these are lava flows which did not come from volcanoes, as the
   volcanoes are all located well to the west, not far from the coast.
   These flows welled up "in situ", apparently from great cracks and
   fissures in the crust. These flows appear much fresher - younger -
   than flows on Hawaii which are known to be far more recent - the rain
   effect.

   Most areas of the earth are much more lush than this area and any
   scars from relatively recent catastrophes tend to be quickly eroded or
   hidden by vegetation. Here in western North America, the whole pattern
   is open and there to wonder about.

   Now, about the Rockies. If a force from beneath is applied to a sheet
   of brittle material - for instance, a sheet of ice - the ice will
   crack, and edges will be tilted upwards. If no other force is applied,
   there will be just that sort of tilting and nothing else. However, if
   an additional side force is applied, the broken edges will push up
   over each other and a series of upthrust tilted edges will appear. The
   Rocky Mountains, especially in the area from Flathead Lake east
   towards Great Falls, Montana, present this exact picture. These ridges
   are very sharp; they tilt with their faces to the east and their
   slopes to the west; and as you look from east to west each succeeding
   ridge is pushed up the back of its predecessor, almost to the same
   altitude. This is obviously not an upthrust from below, but a push
   from west to east - gigantically, suddenly, and quickly. There is no
   gradualism here, and it is painfully obvious. So there is that, too,
   to wonder about.

   Over east of Great Falls, Motana, well east of the main mountain
   chains, just to the north of a separate group of hills, is a perfectly
   circular formation. This formation is forested, but is surrounded by
   circular ridges, giving, from the air, the same impression one gets
   from looking at moon craters; there is another one very similar to it
   just northwest of Helena, Montana.

   The original settlement of Salt Lake City lies at an elevation of
   4,200 feet above sea level in the floor of the valley and only
   slightly above the level of the Great Salt Lake. As the city grew, the
   residential areas were built to the east of the old city on a bench
   several hundred feet above the valley, before the abrupt rise of the
   Wasatch Mountains. This East Bench was the shoreline of what is known
   geologically as Lake Bonneville - a giant freshwater lake which once
   covered immense portions of this inland basin. This lake is supposed
   to have existed a long, long time ago, and to have emptied suddenly
   down through the Snake and Columbia River systems to the Pacific at
   Portland, Oregon. Well, there exists ample evidence, from camp sites
   along this shoreline, that people lived here when the lake was here. I
   lived on this East Bench for a long time, and it was always a matter
   of interest to us how the deer came down to the Bench for water still
   - even though that lake had disappeared a long time ago.

   As I mentioned, Salt Lake City lies at 4,200 feet above sea level;
   Reno, Nevada, lies at about 4,500 feet, at the foot of the Sierra
   Nevada on the east side. Now between Salt Lake and Reno lie numerous
   ranges of mountains; however, none of these presents a solid wall or
   barrier between the cities: it is possible to fly between without
   having to climb to cross any of the ranges.

   Northeast of Reno is a large freshwater lake, Pyramid Lake, and
   southeast of Reno another, Walker Lake. South of Salt Lake, near
   Provo, Utah, is Utah Lake - another freshwater lake. Since this area,
   at valley level, is almost all at the same elevation, I like to think
   that Bonneville Lake once filled the entire basin as one lake, rather
   than the two prehistoric lakes as postulated.

   There is a lot more I have wondered about, but the thing about it is,
   Dr. Velikovsky was the first person who offered me a small glimmer
   into all these things I was wondering about. He gave me an idea about
   all those red pebbles, about how those ridges could look the way they
   do, now that lava welled up through the crust, and how the earth might
   have cracked like an eggshell.

   I don't think it is a bad thing to wonder about these things, or to
   find out what other people wonder about and what they find out. But I
   do think it would be a bad thing if all I was allowed. to believe was
   what was spoon fed to me by an elitist group who, as an act of faith,
   believe they have all the answers. People who have all the answers
   worry me a great deal.
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