http://oaklandgeology.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/human-geomorphology/ focused on, near and under Oakland, California Wed, 22 May 2013 03:36:30 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ http://oaklandgeology.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/human-geomorphology/#comment-489 Fri, 05 Dec 2008 23:48:16 +0000 http://oaklandgeology.wordpress.com/?p=324#comment-489 I remember back in field camp, hiking up the middle Popo Agie River valley near Lander, Wyoming. Since it really was a glacial valley it was full of till and erratics. As we were hiking along someone piped up about the strange hole and radial crack pattern in a lot of the flat stones on the trail. I had to giggle a bit on that one, having shot rock before it was pretty obvious a drilled hole and explosive damage to the rock, it was easier for the trail blazers to simply shoot the erratics in place than to try and lever them out of the way and fill the hole. Looking at the big picture though, look how long it took us to get to this point, thousand and thousands of years of shoveling dirt around and moving holes. As power tools got bigger of the last 150 years, so have our projects. Of course, building a pyramid by hand had to have been more challenging than pushing things out of the way with a D-9.

]]> http://oaklandgeology.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/human-geomorphology/#comment-487 Thu, 04 Dec 2008 03:26:15 +0000 http://oaklandgeology.wordpress.com/?p=324#comment-487 I love the name “human geomorphology” such a fancy term for “shoveling dirt”… My father was responsible for something similar to this over 20 years ago in an unused dirt field in a developed park for his RC cars… after he abandoned it some bmx kids started using it and it’s still there to this day…

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