A Lesson in Abysses

[Image: The surface of the earth peeled away to reveal rock and fissures – a perfect excuse for one of my favorite quotations: “Look down well!” Jules Verne once wrote. “You must take a lesson in abysses.” Image produced by R.C. McDowell, G.J. Grabowski, and S.L. Moore for the U.S. Geological Survey; this is Kentucky. An alternative map, by A.C. Noger, is no less topo-optically extraordinary].

(Earlier: BLDGBLOG’s Topographic Map Circus – although most of the links in that post are now broken).

3 thoughts on “A Lesson in Abysses”

  1. I live in a karst area rife with sinkholes, and they are a major influence on development. The bypass road around town was re-routed to avoid them, sparing the farm where my partner's horse lives. She regularly rides on land in legal limbo, abandoned by its owners because of sinkholes.

  2. Glen, nice photo, thanks!

    Carl, I grew up near a mall (near King of Prussia, outside Philadelphia) that was at risk of collapsing into a sinkhole; and I remember first hearing, when I was 10 or 11, that mall staff were constantly monitoring cracks in the basement walls to make sure the whole thing wasn't about to collapse into some strange void underneath all the happy shoppers. There's something fantastically compelling about sinkholes, and the seeming unpredictability with which they sometimes appear.

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