"Erosion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... silver. Whence it would appear, that as by the repeated explosions of the two electric ethers in the conducting water, both oxygen and hydrogen are liberated; the oxygen erodes the zinc plates, and thus increases the Galvanic shock by liberating their combined electric ethers: and that this erosion is much increased by a mixture either of acid or of volatile alcali with the water. Further experiments are wanting on this subject to show whether metallic bodies emit either or both of the electric ethers at the time of their solution or erosion ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... sight. The land stretched out on all sides—a vast lonesomeness of rolling green and red, broken here and there by towering rocks, grotesque in shape and twisted by erosion into a thousand fanciful sculptures. But at the bottom of a dry wash, Kid Wolf ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... disintegrated by the slow process of erosion. Joseph Parker's work in London tended to make all English clergymen who desired freedom, free. For over twenty years he preached every Thursday noon, and often twice on Sunday. No topic of vital human interest escaped him. He was a self-appointed censor ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... a canoned channel whose banks rise three hundred feet above its bed. They are twin cliffs that front one another, their facades not half so far apart. Rough with projecting points of rock, and scarred by water erosion, they look like angry giants with grim visages frowning mutual defiance. In places they approach, almost to touching; then, diverging, sweep round the opposite sides of an ellipse; again closing like the curved handles of callipers. ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... of good varieties of nut trees which may some day be appreciated even more for food and other uses as our population increases than we as a nation appreciate them today. Tree crops are a means of conserving our soils, both from the point of erosion and moisture holding content. I like the opportunity we have to be far-sighted in encouraging the planting of nut trees which will play a large part in the future well-being of ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... oldest thing that mortal eye can see, since, while observing the ceaseless political or geological changes on earth, the face of this dead satellite, on account of the absence of air and water and consequent erosion, has remained unchanged for bygone ages, as it doubtless will ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... been subject to convulsion and upheaval. The stratified rock lies horizontally just as it was laid down in the bottom of the Devonian Seas millions of years ago. The mountains and the valleys are the result of vast ages of gentle erosion, and gentleness and repose are stamped upon every feature of the landscape. The hand of time and the slow but enormous pressure of the great continental ice sheet have rubbed down and smoothed off all sharp angles, giving to the mountains their long sweeping lines, to ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... branches, and found oneself on the very edge, peering out and down through a green screen. A couple of hundred feet in length and width, it was half of that in depth. Possibly because of some fault that had occurred when the knolls were flung together, and certainly helped by freakish erosion, the hole had been scooped out in the course of centuries by the wash of water. Nowhere did the raw earth appear. All was garmented by vegetation, from tiny maiden-hair and gold-back ferns to mighty redwood ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... formed at very high temperatures or from molten materials. They come from magmas—molten mixtures of minerals, often containing gases. They come from deep below the surface of the earth. If they cool off while below the surface, they form intrusive rocks, which may later be revealed by erosion. When magmas reach the surface red hot, they form extrusive rocks, such as volcanic rocks. Thus, granite is an igneous, intrusive rock; lava is an igneous, extrusive rock. (Notice how the type of rock tells its past history—if you know what to ...
— Let's collect rocks & shells • Shell Oil Company
... behind it passing along the division line to the mouth of the Hudson. Southern Jersey was in short an island with a sound behind it very much like the present Long Island. The shoal and island had been formed in the far distant geologic past by the erosion and washings from the lofty Pennsylvania mountains now worn ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... comparatively soft metal larger than the bore; the gas then acting on the base of the projectile, forces the band through the grooves, sealing the escape, entering the projectile, and, to a great extent, mitigating the erosion of surface. This is, of course, universally known. It is also pretty generally known among artillerists that the effect of the resistance offered by the band or sheathing on the powder is to cause more complete combustion of the charge before the shot ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... is now a mass of ruins, and all the finer striations have been effaced from the flanks by post-glacial weathering, while the irregularity of its lavas as regards susceptibility to erosion, and the disturbance caused by inter- and post-glacial eruptions, have obscured or obliterated those heavier characters of the glacial record found so clearly inscribed upon the granite pages of the high Sierra between latitude 36 degrees 30 minutes and 39 degrees. This ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... have ended in another half-minute had the struggle not been at the very edge of the bank. Undermined by the erosion of the spring floods, a section of this bank suddenly gave way, and with it went Baree and half the pack. In a flash Baree thought of the water and the escaping caribou. For a bare instant the cave-in had set him free of the pack, and ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... rutted by erosion and drifted over with sand and dry leaves, began to rise. Jerry shifted into low gear. Then, suddenly, he stopped. He'd had another shock. He had just realized this road was unused. He recalled the ...
— The Invaders • Benjamin Ferris
... Erosion of water and wind have bared the sedimentary rocks and exposed the layers in well defined pages so I may study this great rock-paged geology book, and indeed it's a ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... has certainly formed the Theban wadis. But this water erosion was probably not that which would be the result of perennial streams flowing down from wooded heights, but of torrents like those of to-day, which fill the wadis once in three years or so after heavy rain, but repeated at much ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... of production in agriculture will probably be a most serious one, because of influences such as soil-mining, deforestation, and depletion of soil through erosion, the immediate problems are, rather, the adjustment of production to demand so that the farmer will be on a more equitable income basis with other elements in the population. When there is newspaper talk of again burning corn for fuel, when wool is a drug on the market, ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt
... and that circular lines become nearly impossible under any circumstances. The gradual acceleration, for instance, of velocity, in streams that descend from hill-sides, as it gradually increases their power of erosion increases in the same gradual degree the rate of curvature in the descent of the slope, until at a certain degree of steepness this descent meets, and is concealed by the right line of the detritus. The junction of this right ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... avalanche, the attrition of glacier, the erosion of water, the cracking of frost, the weathering of rain and wind and snow—these it had eternally fought and resisted in vain, yet still it stood magnificent, frowning, battle-scarred and undefeated. Its sky-piercing peaks were as cries for mercy to the Infinite. This old ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... the earthquakes at San Francisco and Valparaiso, and the tidal waves and cyclones of the South Seas; but the results of these sporadic and local cataclysms are far less than the effects of the persistent everyday forces of erosion, each one of which seems so small and futile. When we look at the Rocky Mountains with their high and rugged peaks, it seems almost impossible that rain and frost and snow could ever break them up and wear them down so that they would become like the rounded hills ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... each year as forest growth restored. His statements regarding the tremendous soil waste in our farming methods were likewise astounding. Resolutions were adopted covering the entire subject of conservation as shown in one of them as follows: "We agree that the land should be so used that erosion and soil-wash shall cease; that there should be reclamation of arid and semi-arid regions by means of irrigation, and of swamps and overflowed regions by means of drainage; that the waters should be so conserved and used as to promote navigation, ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... Lake the Nascaupee River flows through an ancient valley, which is from a few hundred yards to a mile wide and cut deep into the old Archaean rocks, affording an excellent example of river erosion. The banks are of sand, and in some places clay, extending back to the foot of the precipitous hills. Apparently the ancient river valley has been partly filled with drift, down through which the river has cut its ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... complete revolution. If, at any time, the sun radiated much less than its present amount of heat, no water could have existed on the earth's surface except in the form of ice; there would have been scarcely any evaporation, and the geological changes due to erosion could not have taken place. Moreover, the commencement of the geological operations of which we speak is by no means the commencement of the earth's existence. The theories of both parties agree that, for untold aeons before the geological changes now visible commenced, ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... The erosion of the ages had played strange tricks with the sandstone. The rocks rose like huge red toadstools or like prehistoric animals of vast size. One of them was known as the Three ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... in abrupt cliffs overlooking the sea. From other peaks extensive grass covered plains slope gently down nearly to the water's edge. Deep river canons cut between these mountains and across the plains, giving evidence of active erosion for a long period of time. If these mountain chains and river courses are followed back it is found that they all radiate from one stupendous mass, the center of which is Mt. Apo, the highest mountain ...
— The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao - The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition • Fay-Cooper Cole
... mountains, glaciers began to crawl, covering them from the summits to the sea with a mantle of ice; and then with infinite deliberation the work went on of sculpturing the range anew. These mighty agents of erosion, halting never through unnumbered centuries, crushed and ground the flinty lavas and granites beneath their crystal folds, wasting and building until in the fullness of time the Sierra was born again, brought to light nearly as we behold it today, with glaciers and snow-crushed pines at the top ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... estimate the age of anything here; things weather so slowly that most of the buildings might have been put up yesterday. No rainfall, no earthquakes, no vegetation is here to spread cracks with its roots—nothing. The only aging factors here are the erosion of the wind—and that's negligible in this atmosphere—and the cracks caused by changing temperature. And one other agent—meteorites. They must crash down occasionally on the city, judging from the thinness of the air, and the fact that ...
— Valley of Dreams • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... the settlers first landed and where they first lived. According to the map, that historic, first landing-place would be anything but a landing-place to-day; for figure "25" (that was it) stood well out in the river. The loss by erosion had been great along that part of the shore since those first settlers arrived. But even though the landing-place could not be seen, one could look out on the waters anyway and see ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... washed away, usually clear off of the original owner's farm, and deposited in the flood-plains or bottoms of creeks and rivers or in river deltas—in places where it cannot be utilized to any great extent. Thus erosion causes a tremendous loss to farmers, and it is chiefly due to the thoughtlessness of the American people in destroying ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... fertilizer. Strips six to eight feet wide on each side of the contoured rows received frequent cultivation each growing season, while strips of orchard grass sod were left between the rows to prevent erosion. The soil is Riverdale (tentative series) sandy loam that had been in orchard grass sod for ten years before the experiment was begun. It has been necessary to spray the trees each year with DDT, parathion, or both to control ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... of sand on the right which had been cut out by the erosion of the violent current. Near by some philanthropist had put up a sign, "Keep a Good ...
— Klondike Nuggets - and How Two Boys Secured Them • E. S. Ellis
... five times per year along southern and eastern coasts), damaging floods, tsunamis, earthquakes; deforestation; soil erosion; industrial pollution; water ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... I really knew exactly where Tripoli was. About thirty years ago, when I learnt geography, one of the questions they were always asking me was, "What are the exports of Spain, and where is Tripoli?" But much may happen in twenty years; coast erosion and tidal waves and things like that. I looked at the map in order to assure myself that Tripoli had remained pretty firm. As far as I could make it out it had moved. Certainly it must have looked different thirty years ago, ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... to the Nile. All Lower Egypt is a creation of the river by the gradual accumulation of sediment at its mouths. Upper Egypt has been dug out of the desert sand and underlying rock by a process of erosion centuries long. Once the Nile filled all the space between the hills that line its sides. Now it flows through a thick layer of alluvial mud deposited by the ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... deforestation; soil erosion; desertification; air pollution in Beirut from vehicular traffic and the burning of industrial wastes; pollution of coastal waters from raw sewage and ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... morphologically transition forms between mainland and islands; by slight geological changes one is converted into the other. Great Britain was a peninsula at the end of the Tertiary period, before subsidence and the erosion of Dover Channel combined to sever it from the continent. It bears to-day in its flora and fauna the evidence of its former broad connection with the mainland.[804] In Pliocene times, Sicily and Sardinia were united ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... mound of earth or stone worn away by erosion," answered the Professor, with an assurance that forbade any one to question the correctness ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Grand Canyon - The Mystery of Bright Angel Gulch • Frank Gee Patchin
... consist of huge parallel chains with river and lake-basins of profound depth between them. In Mexico the same formation must have existed, but the basins have been filled up by material discharged from volcanoes and from the erosion of the mountains themselves, doubtless caused by the severe and sudden rain-storms and rapid changes of temperature characteristic of these regions. Thus the great plateau may be likened to a number of filled-up troughs, through whose general surface the tops of mountain ranges still ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... worthy of remark, that nowhere near Valparaiso above the height of twenty feet, or rarely of fifty feet, I saw any lines of erosion on the solid rocks, or any beds of pebbles; this, I believe, may be accounted for by the disintegrating tendency of most of the rocks in this neighbourhood. Nor is the land here modelled into terraces: ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... earlier in the day. It was a cleft in the rock, the result of some subterranean upheaval which had caused the whole crag to settle into its base; a fissure, originally a mere crack which had been widened and deepened by the erosion of time. Upon closer inspection, it was larger than it had appeared from below, perhaps ten feet in width at the outside, and ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... pas que l'erosion des eaux pluviales, des torrens et des rivieres, soit l'unique cause de la formation des vallees: le redressement des couches des montagnes nous force a en admettre une autre, dont je parlerai ailleurs; j'ai voulu seulement prouver, ici que la correspondance ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... as ample illustrations in the sweeping Rhine as in any of the humbler streams whose courses I had watched and studied at home. These two principles afford perhaps the strongest and most conclusive of all proofs, that the hills and valleys of our planet are all the result of erosion. ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... commercial transaction. Its problem was not to secure dividends but to accomplish moral benefit. He abhorred the politics of prestige. He knew the difficulties involved in administering distant territories, the ignorance and apathy of the public, the consequent erosion of responsibility, the chance that wrong will fail of discovery. But he did not shrink from his conclusion. "Let us do what we please," he said, "to put India from our thoughts, we can do nothing to separate ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... glaciers was so great, that, advancing several leagues into the sea, it formed three parallel promontories, which rose above the sea-level, where there had formerly been a depth of forty fathoms of water. Vast ravines were, at the same time, scooped out of the sides of the mountain by the erosion of the waters. Another eruption of this volcano ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... wise a sweeping survey of the physical universe may be thought in the terms of natural science. The uniformitarian method in geology, resolving the history of the crust of the earth into known processes, such as erosion and igneous fusion;[244:13] and spectral analysis, with its discoveries concerning the chemical constituents of distant bodies through the study of their light, have powerfully reenforced this effort of thought, and apparently completed an outline sketch of ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... when water channels and reservoirs become clotted with silt and mud, a side effect of deforestation and soil erosion. ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States |
