from Massimo Pietrobon:
Pangaea with modern political borders superimposed, by Massimo Pietrobon
Common complaint from students in the sheer amount of new vocabulary in geology:
The AGI’s “Glossary of Geology”, no self-respecting bookshelf should be without it
Can’t say I entirely disagree, personally think they should get foreign language credit for geology classes.
sheetflood – a broad expanse of moving, storm-borne water that spreads as a thin, continuous, relatively uniform film over a large area in an arid region that is not concetrated into well defined channels; it’s distance of flow is short and its druation is measure in minutes or hours. Sheetfloods usually occur before runoff is sufficient to promote channel flow, or after a period of sudden and heavy rainfall. Syn: sheetwash
sheetwash - (a) a sheetflood occuring in a humid region. (b) …
~ American Geological Institute, Glossary of Geology (5th edition)
Had a welcome bit of rain this evening, took this picture of my complex’s parking lot:
Sheetwash on parking lot tarmac; 5/28/2013; Alexandria, VA
Part of an ongoing quest to find a better way of illustrating sheetwash for my “pluvial and fluvial” lecture. There is an adequate explanation in the textbook, but no figure or image.
Google image search doesn’t yield anything satisfying, mostly I imagine because of the inherent difficulty of photographing something that by definition occurs during torrential rainfall. Might also be hard to pick out in a rain-smeared photograph because of the heterogeneity of natural surface. The best I’ve been able to do so far is catch the equivalent process on a homogenous, artificial surface.
And so it begins…
I am an adjunct instructor who has been teaching Physical and Historical Geology in the Virginia Community College system for a few years now… starting this little geo-blog as a summer sabbatical project
What to expect:
* on the pretext that I need more photos of living species for my Pleistocene / Holocene lecture
