05-22-2022, 09:25 PM
It's a fairly regular occurrence around here, especially after spring storms. All that water soaks into the ground, loosens and lubricates it, and the next think you know what used to be a hillside is now creek-bottom land. It's been going on for around 280 million years here, and won't stop until this place is a flat plain, just as Isaiah said.
These Appalachian mountains were, at one time, taller than the Himalayas are now. estimates place their height at 45,000 or 46,000 feet. Now the average is, I would guess, about 2500 feet. In this area, it ranges from 1400 feet up to about 4500 feet.
The spring before I moved away from Buchanan County, VA, the rains brought a mountainside down on Rt. 460 northwest of Grundy, and it took nearly a week to clear the road enough for traffic to pass. There was a family living on the hill above it. When they got up that morning, they had a beautiful well-manicured lawn and a majestic driveway. By sundown, they were perched on the edge of a cliff with about 3 feet of their lawn left before house started, and no way to get in or out from it.
They call the land slides "slips" around here, because when you watch one, it looks like the side of the mountain just slips off and falls. When I was growing up you could always tell when one had happened, because it left a bare hillside with nothing but red clay showing and a pile of red clay and turf at the bottom. That made them easy to spot after the fact.
The area I grew up in was a place called "Glade Hollow" in Russell County, VA. It was a long valley, around 6 or 8 miles long, and it was shot full of sinkholes, mostly ancient, but every now and then a new one would open up. The terrain there, as in most of the Virginia Valley and Ridge region, was what they call "karst" - a thin layer of dirt on a limestone substrate bedrock. I think parts of Romania are very similar to it. Over millions of years, underground water had dissolved the limestone and left behind a vast network of caverns cut from the limestone. Every now and then, usually again after a deep rain, a thin part of the cavern roofs would collapse into the caverns, leaving a sinkhole on the surface to show there was once a surface there. some of the sinkholes were hundreds of yards long, others only about 10 or 15 feet in diameter and about that same depth.
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These Appalachian mountains were, at one time, taller than the Himalayas are now. estimates place their height at 45,000 or 46,000 feet. Now the average is, I would guess, about 2500 feet. In this area, it ranges from 1400 feet up to about 4500 feet.
The spring before I moved away from Buchanan County, VA, the rains brought a mountainside down on Rt. 460 northwest of Grundy, and it took nearly a week to clear the road enough for traffic to pass. There was a family living on the hill above it. When they got up that morning, they had a beautiful well-manicured lawn and a majestic driveway. By sundown, they were perched on the edge of a cliff with about 3 feet of their lawn left before house started, and no way to get in or out from it.
They call the land slides "slips" around here, because when you watch one, it looks like the side of the mountain just slips off and falls. When I was growing up you could always tell when one had happened, because it left a bare hillside with nothing but red clay showing and a pile of red clay and turf at the bottom. That made them easy to spot after the fact.
The area I grew up in was a place called "Glade Hollow" in Russell County, VA. It was a long valley, around 6 or 8 miles long, and it was shot full of sinkholes, mostly ancient, but every now and then a new one would open up. The terrain there, as in most of the Virginia Valley and Ridge region, was what they call "karst" - a thin layer of dirt on a limestone substrate bedrock. I think parts of Romania are very similar to it. Over millions of years, underground water had dissolved the limestone and left behind a vast network of caverns cut from the limestone. Every now and then, usually again after a deep rain, a thin part of the cavern roofs would collapse into the caverns, leaving a sinkhole on the surface to show there was once a surface there. some of the sinkholes were hundreds of yards long, others only about 10 or 15 feet in diameter and about that same depth.
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Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king.
Said Aristippus, ‘If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.’ Said Diogenes, ‘Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king.’
Said Aristippus, ‘If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.’ Said Diogenes, ‘Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king.’