Weathering Erosion And Deposition Quotes

The earth is a dynamic place [...] with multiple different processes of deposition and erosion under way at all times. You can make guesses based on style and weathering, but fragments of worked stone that have been in the open for an unknown period can't be dated by their archaeological context, because there is none. Carbon-dating organic materials in the sediment in which they were found won't work, either, because they were never entombed and preserved in sediment. And in fact no other objective and widely accepted method of dating can tell us how old they are. For these reasons archaeologists have to discount artifacts found on the surface when coming to any conclusions about the age of a site, even though the artifacts themselves may obviously be ancient.

As students, we have already studied the four spheres and some of their basic interactions, and we have already reviewed the basics of erosion, deposition, and weathering. Since fifth grade, we have been told that photosynthesis converts solar energy to chemical energy, and since sixth grade, we have been told about Pangaea and Plate Tectonics. It is all just a loop. We are just learning the same things over and over again. I have always been left to ask myself, “Can’t I just find an activity that does not provide me with knowledge that is RUDIMENTARY AND SUPERFICIAL?

I was going home. But home, too, was hard to get an image of, harder still to think beyond the last curved enclosure of the desert, where it seemed I had left the better portion of myself as one among innumerable grains of sand, how in the end the weather-beaten stone is not one stone but only that which has been weathered, a result, an example of slow erosion on a thing by wind or waves that break against it, so that the else of anyone involved ends up deposited like silt spilling out into an estuary, or gathered at the bottom of a river in a city that is all you can remember.