My experiments with volcanoesJaggar, Thomas Augustus
Science
My experiments with volcanoes
Jaggar, Thomas Augustus
Geologists -- Biography; Volcanoes
At a geological conference at Harvard I showed blueprints made directly
from glass plates covered with artificial ripplemarks. At the same time
I exhibited rock slabs of fossil ripplemarks and photographs of others
shaped like horseshoes. These were variants of the rippledrift process
seen on sandy beds of running streams. I also showed photographs of
swash marks running along the upper steep slopes of beaches. And of the
wind-formed rippledrift of dry sand dunes. From the deserts of Peru
come photographs of _medaños_, or crescent dunes, hills of sand
tapering to curved points at both ends. The points are downwind, the
high horseshoe toe of the hill is upwind, and like a coral atoll the
edifice is current-formed.
Ripplemarks can form in hundreds of fathoms of ocean water if the storm
waves on the surface of the sea are big enough. A particle of water on
the crest of a wave is lifted up and down in a long vertical ellipse.
A particle deep down under the wave is lifted fore and aft in a long
horizontal ellipse. Under a three-hundred-foot length of wave in the
English Channel in deep water the bottom particles of water are shoving
sand back and forth, and making packed ripplemarks.
A big sand grain becomes a lump for small sand grains to bump against.
They make a heap which piles up and lengthens out. The heaps merge and
we get a tightly packed and ridged sandy bottom. Each ridge has an eddy
first on one side, then on the other, as the water particles reverse in
direction. Oscillation builds first flocculence, then alignment, then
even spacing. The opposite sides of a ridge have equal slopes.
Rippledrift is made by a current in one direction. It is usually not so
regular or in such straight ridges as ripplemarks. If a stream of water
is jetted over sand round and round in a ringshaped tank, ridges will
migrate along the bottom, but they are smeary. The regular ripples in
dry sand on dunes have flatter slopes upwind, steep scarps downwind.
They are regular, probably because wind blowing is intermittent and
back currents occur. So they become more like ripplemarks.
On the bottoms of water streams, the horseshoe rippledrift requires
a nice adjustment of lumps and side points migrating downstream. All
rippling requires a sand of mixed sizes of grains. If they were all
alike they would not ripple, for the larger grains have to obstruct the
smaller ones in order to produce the ripple pattern. Rippledrifting
as a whole is a building mechanism. Mixed with wave currents which
move beaches along, including beach pebbles, it can be compounded
into building oceanic islands. The crescent dunes of the desert are
dependent on the prevailing winds being loaded with a sand supply at a
windward erosion source.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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