� 2001-2006 by Shiloh
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blankLast night I finished an ok book; at least, it (the book by Trish Morey) was semi-entertaining. (I'd forgotten how somewhat cheesy and stylistic the Harlequin Presents books are/can be, it's been so long since I've read one. Needless to say, I'm not going to make it a habit of picking many of those books up in the future. Most--and I'm not trying to disparage the authors' talents who write them--are simplistic enough that, if I really set my mind to it, I could probably write one and maybe sell it to Harlequin for publication.)
But this is not the point of today's entry. I only mention the book because one of its scenes sparked a thought and fueled my imagination a bit, enough so to warrant, in my opinion, further exploration.
Sometimes we hear the saying, The shifting sands (of time). What picture does that conjure up for you? For me, I see in my mind's eye the visible horizontal--or the more common slanted--movement of the topmost layer of sand, drifting down across the wide sloping dunes of a desert.
Another thing about the desert clime I find fascinating is how the sky can seem so blue at times, then it looks almost white, as if the sweltering heat has bleached almost all the blue from the sky. For some reason, this captivates me.
Somewhere I heard, or read long ago, that the deserts on Earth now were once covered in lush green vegetation. That they transformed into the deserts they now are through the process of--what else--desertification. Aaanndd of course, this has gotten my brain going again, with more ponderings and questions.
This planet we call Earth, the planet the human race has called home for millennia upon millennia is far beyond ancient. Once upon a time, there was only one land mass, Pangea(sp?), until the law of tectonics (the science of how the Earth's crust moves) broke it up into several continents and islands and created new ones (islands). And mountain ranges. If I remember right, at least from the depictions I've seen from the dinosaur days, the climate was a tropical rain forest. Hardly a desert at all. So that means--which we already know so well--there was a major climate change, a key factor for desertification.
As the Earth is millions of years old, its face and climates have changed time and time again. For instance, Lake Bonneville. Lake Bonneville was an extensive, ancient lake that existed from about 32 to 14 thousand years ago. It occupied the lowest, closed depression in the eastern Great Basin and at its largest extent covered about 20,000 square miles of western Utah and smaller portions of eastern Nevada and southern Idaho.
Then approximately 16,800 years ago, the lake swelled, rising to the elevation of Red Rock Pass (in Idaho) and began to flow northward into the Snake River drainage basin. The flow of water through the pass began a rapid downcutting process that caused a catastrophic flood.
After the flooding of Lake Bonneville, the Great Basin gradually became warmer and drier. The once great lake began to shrink due to increased evaporation. Today's Great Salt Lake is a large remnant of Lake Bonneville, occupying the lowest depression in the Great Basin. Other remnants of Lake Bonneville include Utah Lake, Sevier Lake and the Great Salt Lake Desert containing the famous Bonneville Salt Flats.
Thinking about the deserts...and all this that I've just imparted--*blushes* yes, my name is Shiloh, and I'm an involved, complicated thinker--has me pondering what the world must have looked like millions of years ago. It was obviously very different than it is today. Today, four kinds of deserts--some say there's only two, hot and cold--cover about one-fifth of the Earth's surface. The four types are the
Does the reverse of desertificaton take an equal amount of time, or is it a faster process? And does it take equally traumatic factors to play a part in the reversal?
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