{"id":1946,"date":"2020-01-15T17:01:07","date_gmt":"2020-01-15T22:01:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/?p=1946"},"modified":"2020-01-15T17:01:35","modified_gmt":"2020-01-15T22:01:35","slug":"measuring-the-pulse-of-the-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/?p=1946","title":{"rendered":"Measuring the Pulse of the Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I am currently reading Annals of the Former World<\/a>, John McPhee’s geological history of the United States. It pulls together four previously published books and then a final fifth book and includes a fascinating narrative table of contents where McPhee gives an overview of two decades of travel and writing.<\/p>\n

I have had it on my shelf for a very long time and decided this was the year to dive in. And, I am so glad I did. McPhee was an English major who dabbled in science, especially geology. His writing is a pleasure to read. The first book, Basin and Range, is a combination of travel memoir and scientific treatise and historical outline. McPhee’s passion spills over when he tries to explain his interest in geology:<\/p>\n

Geology was called a descriptive science, and with its pitted outwash plains and drowned rivers, its hanging tributaries and starved coastlines, it was nothing if not descriptive. I was a fountain of metaphor–of isostatic adjustments and\u00a0 degraded channels, of angular unconformities, and shifting divides, of rootless mountain and bitter lakes (p. 31)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He introduces us to the early geologists, including Sherlock Holmes who despite being fictional was the first forensic geologist, interpreting bits of grit from various locales.<\/p>\n

And, I learned that it is not just the water tides that are impacted by the moon. In fact, there are solid-earth tides: “The sea is not all that responds to the moon. Twice a day the solid earth bobs up and down, as much as a foot. That kind of force and that kind of distance are more than enough to break hard rock” (p. 21). I did not know this bit of geological trivia. While I don’t completely understand the science described here, this article describes the idea of “rock tides.”\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am currently reading Annals of the Former World, John McPhee’s geological history of the United States. It pulls together four previously published books and then a final fifth book and includes a fascinating narrative table of contents where McPhee gives an overview of two decades of travel and writing. I have had it on … Continue reading Measuring the Pulse of the Earth<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[74,54],"tags":[514,513],"class_list":["post-1946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-reading","tag-geology","tag-john-mcphee"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4X3L0-vo","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1946"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1946\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1948,"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1946\/revisions\/1948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}