The discovery predicted uranium in other sedimentary basins, and Love went on to find it. In the autumn of i953, he and two amateurs, all working independently, found uranium in the Gas Hills-in the Wind River Basin, twelve miles from Love Ranch. By his description: “Gas Hills attracted everybody and his dog. It was Mecca for weekend prospectors. They swarmed like maggots on a carcass. There was claim jumping. There were fistfights, shootouts. Mechanics and clothing salesmen were instant millionaires.” As it happened, he made those  zakelijke energie vergelijken remarks one summery afternoon on the crest of the Gas Hills, where fifty open-pit uranium mines were round about us, and in the low middle ground of the view to the north were Muskrat Creek and Love Ranch. The pits were roughly circular, generally half a mile in diameter, and five hundred feet deep. Some four hundred feet of overburden had been stripped
off to get down to the ore horizons. The place was an unearthly mess. War damage could not look worse, and in a sense that is what it was. “If you had to do this with a pick and shovel, it would take you quite a while,” Love said. The pits were scattered across a hundred square miles. We picked up some sooty black uraninite. It crumbled easily in the hand. I asked him if it was dangerously radioactive. “What is ‘dangerously radioactive’?” he said. “We have no real standards. We don’t know. All I can say is the cancer rate here is very high. There are four synergistic zakelijke energie elements in the Gas Hills: uranium, molybdenum, selenium, and arsenic. They are more toxic together than individually. You can’t just cover the tailings and forget about it. Those things are bad for the environment. They get into groundwater, surface water. The mines are below the water table, so they’re pumping water from the uranium horizon to the surface. There has been a seven-hundred-per-cent increase of uranium in Muskrat Creek at our ranch.” We could see in a sweeping glance-from the ranch southwest to Green Mountain-the whole of the route he had taken as a boy to cut pine and cedar for corral poles and fence posts. An hour before, we had looked in at the ranch, where most of those posts were still in use-gnarled and twisted, but standing and not rotted. From John Love’s early years there, when he slept in a cutbank of the creek, the ranch had belonged only to him and his family.

The other one is less intense than Yellowstone, and is at present centered under Raton, New Mexico. Volcanoes are at the surface there. The Raton plume has lifted the Texas panhandle, the southern Colorado high plains. Its easternmost lava flow is in western Oklal1oma. Its track, parallel to Yellowstone’s, includes the Jemez Caldera, above Los Alamos, and may have begun in the Pacific. To the question “What lifted the Colorado Plateau, the Great Plains, and the Rocky Mountain platform?” the answer given by this theory is “The plumes of Raton and Yellowstone.” As Utah and Nevada crossed the hot spots, the zakelijke energie plumes are thought to have initiated the extensional faulting that has separated the sites of Reno and Salt Lake City by sixty miles in eight million years, breaking the earth into fault blocks and creating the physiographic province of the Basin and Range. Work done in the rock-dating laboratory of Richard Armstrong, a geochemist and geochronologist at the University of British Columbia, showed that Basin and Range faulting began at the western extreme of the region and moved eastward at a general rate of twenty-eight miles per million years-a frame commensurate in time and space with the continent’s progress over the hot spots now positioned under Yellowstone and Raton. The Tetons began to rise eight million years ago and are clearly not products of the Laramide Orogeny. They are a result of extensional faulting, and zakelijke energie vergelijken conform to hot-spot theory as the easternmost expression of the Basin and Range. The Colorado Plateau lies between the two hot-spot tracks, and Morgan believes that their combined influence is what lifted it, setting up the hydraulic energy that has etched out the canyonlands. How the plateau avoided the rifting and extension that went on all around it-why it, too, did not break into blocks-is a question that leaves him baffled. That the two hot spots, at any rate, are progressively lifting the country is a point reinforced by a remarkable observation: a line drawn between them is the Continental Divide. Inevitably, it has been suggested that someday North America may split apart along the Yellowstone perforations of the Snake River Plain. “That gives me a caution,” says David Love. “I think there are some problems there.

On a geologic map, as on any scientific publication, the name of the person primarily responsible appears first. The job involves so many years and such a prodigious bibliography that the completion of a state geologic map can be regarded as the work of a lifetime, and David Love is only the second person in the history of American geology who has served as senior author of a state map twice (Wyoming i955, Wyoming i985). Geology is a descriptive, interpretive science, and conflict is commonplace among its practitioners. Where two or more geologists have come to divergent conclusions, Love has had to go out and rehearse their field work, in order to decide what to show on the map. People tend to become omery when the validity of their assertions is challenged, and figuratively some of his colleagues have reached for their holsters, which may have been a mistake, as the buttons fell off their shirts and they felt a little breeze. The 1955 Wyoming map. set a standard for state geologic maps in the detail of its coverage, in its fossil dating, in its delivery of the zakelijke energie vergelijken essence of the region-a standard set anew in the i985 edition. In the words of Malcolm McKenna, of the American Museum of Natural History, “Most maps are patched together from various papers and reports. Dave has looked at all the rock. It’s all in one mind. Most geologic maps are maps of time, not rocks. They will say something like ‘undifferentiated Jurassic’ and omit saying what the rocks are. There is little of that on Dave’s map. Mapping is below the salt now. Yet you can’t look at satellite photos for everything. You’ve got to have high-resolution basic mapping. You have to keep your hand in with the real stuff. When the solid foundations aren’t there, geologists are talking complete mush. Dave is making sure the foundation is there. He does not write about geology from a distance. He does not sit in high councils figuring out how the eaith works. He is field-oriented. Some geologists think field zakelijke energie work is wheeling their machines out into the yard. Dave has his hand on the pulse.

When the boys were teen-aged, they occasionally saddled up and rode twenty-six miles to dances in Shoshoni. (I once asked David if they were square dances, and he said, “No. It was contact sport.”) After dancing half the night, they rode twenty-six miles home. Their mother rented a house in Lander and stayed there with them while they attended Fremont County Vocational High School. One of their classmates was William Shakespeare, whose other name was War Bonnet. Lander at that time was the remotest town in Wyoming. It advertised itself as “the end of the rails and the start of the trails.” Now and again, when the zakelijke energie vergelijken boys and their mother went visiting, they went through Red Canyon. A scene of great beauty, long sinuous Red Canyon was a presentation of the Mesozoic, framed in wide margins of time. In the eastern escarpment, the rock, tilting upward, protruded from the earth in cliffs six hundred feet high, and these
were Eocene over Paleocene over Cretaceous and Jurassic benches above the red Triassic wall. Upward to the west ran a sage-covered Permian slope, on a line of sight that led higher in altitude and lower in time to the Precambrian roof of the Wind River Range-peaks on the western horizon. Within the Triassic red was a distinctive white line that ran on as far as the eye could see. It was amazingly consistent, five feet thick, a limestone. In time, David would learn that this uniform bed covered fifty thousand square miles and was one of the most unusual rock units anywhere in the world, with such an absence of diagnostic fossils that no one could tell if the water it formed in was fresh or salt. (“It is a major marker bed of the Rockies,” he once said, pointing it out to me. “Fifty thousand square miles-try to imagine any place in the zakelijke energie world today where you can find that kind of stability. I can’t. It’s unique geologically.”) As a youth, though, he was less fascinated by this Alcova limestone than by other aspects of Red Canyon. A woman who lived there was known as Red Canyon Red, for her striking Triassic hair. She was -as he would in later years describe her-“a whore par excellence.” This may have been one reason that the boys’ mother routinely accompanied her sons when they went through Red Canyon Red’s canyon.

Boulder beds in the roadcuts represented, as Love put it, “the deroofing of tl1e Medicine Bow Mountains in the first pulsation of the Laramide Revolution.” The beds were of Paleocene age. In a knife-edge ridge a few miles farther on, the interstate had exposed the same conglomerates tilted forty-five degrees as mountain building continued. And soon after that came a flat-lying Eocene deposit. “So you have a time frame for the orogeny,” Love said, and this was when he added, “It didn’t take very long for those mountains to come zakelijke energie up, to be deroofed, and to be thrust eastward. Then the motion stopped. That happened in maybe ten million years, and to a geologist that’s really fast.” Near Arlington, an anomalous piece of landscape reached straight out from the mountains like a causeway heading north. It was capped with stream gravel, brought off the mountains by furious rivers rushing through the tundras of Pleistocene time. The gravel had resisted subsequent erosion, while lighter stuff was washed away on either side. Geologists call such things pediments, and Love remarked that the one before us was “the most striking pediment in this region.” In my mind’s eye I could see the braided rivers coming off the Alaska Range, thickly spreading gravels, perhaps to preserve beneath them the scenes of former worlds. Where I-80 cut through the Arlington pediment, the zakelijke energie vergelijken Pleistocene gravel rested on Eocene sandstones, on red and green claystones; and they in turn covered conglomerates that came from the mountains when the mountains were new. One could read upward from one world to another: the boulders falling from rising mountains, the quiet landscapes after the violence stopped-all preserved in a perplexing memento from the climate of an age of ice. In a cut eight miles farther on, that early conglomerate was in contact with Cretaceous rock bent upward even more steeply as the Laramide Orogeny lifted the mountains. Picking through the evidence in the conglomerate was like sorting out debris from an explosion.

Along the Nebraska-Wyoming line, in the region of the forty-first parallel, is a long lumpy break in the plains, called Pine Bluffs. It is rock of about the same age and story as Scotts Bluff, which is not far away. David Love-standing on top of Pine Bluffs-remarked that for a great many emigrants with their wagons and carts these had been the first breaks in the horizon west of Missouri. From the top of the bluffs, the emigrants had their first view of the front ranges of the Rockies, and the mountains gave them hope and courage. For our part, looking west from the same place, we could not see very far across the spring wildflowers into the swirling snow. The Laramie Range was directly zakelijke energie vergelijken ahead and the Never Summer Mountains off somewhere to the soutl1west-at ten and nearly thirteen thousand feet indeed a stirring sight, but not today. Love said a spring snowstorm was “sort of like a kiss-it’s temporary, and it will go away.” (That one stopped us for three days.) Meanwhile, there were large roadcuts to examine where Interstate 80 sliced through the bluffs, and scenes to envision that were veiled by more than snow. The bluffs stand above the surrounding country because-like other mesas and buttes-they are all that is left of what was the surrounding country. The rock of Pine Bluffs is sedimentary (limestone, sandstone) and seems to lie flat, but in fact it tilts very slightly, and if its bedding planes are projected westward a hundred miles they describe the former zakelijke energie landscape, rising about sixty feet a mile to touch the summits of mountains. “There was a continuous surface,” Love said. “It came over the top of the Laramie Range and out here onto the High Plains. Pine Bluffs was part of that surface.”

We camped there for a week, hunted for them day after day, and found a handful. Now, in the same place, they’re thicker than fleas on a dog. They can’t cross non-seleniferous barriers, except with the help of human beings. In the Rocky Mountains generally, millions of acres have been converted. People sometimes think neighbors have poisoned their pastures.” Ten miles beyond the North Platte, a flat-topped ridge formed the horizon before us-a tough sandstone, disintegrating at a lower rate than surrounding shale. The interstate, encountering this obstacle, had dealt with it with dynamite, opening up what highway engineers called a benched throughcut and geologists finding such a thing in nature call a wind gap. When we reached it, we stopped, got out, and put our noses on the outcrop, for this high multitiered kantoor huren per uur amsterdam exposure was Frontier sandstone, and Love referred to it as “a published roadcut,” studied to the last grain by paleontologists and stratigraphers. The reason for so much attention was not readily apparent in the gray and somewhat gloomy, sooty-looking rock, antiqued with fossil burrows. Nonetheless, it seemed to excite Loveas he picked at it with his hammer-at least as much as the woody asters had repelled him. The rock had been submarine sand, not far offshore. “Frontier is one of the great oil sands in the Rocky Mountain region,” he said. At five, ten, twenty thousand feet, wildcat after wildcat had found handsome pay in this celebrated host formation, and here it was at the kantoor huren per uur leeuwarden surface, fresh, unweathered, presenting clues to its wealth. Because oil is vulnerable to destruction by increased heat-in the earth as in the engine of a car-the oldest oil that has been recovered in large quantity is probably Cretaceous in age (loosely speaking, about a hundred million years). For about one human life span, geologists have had the ability to discern where, in the subsurface, oil should be. A large percentage of all the oil on earth has been burned up in fifty years. Around i975, the quantity being discovered had diminished to the level of the quantity being burned. Love remarked that half a billion barrels of oil had been found in the Frontier sandstone in one field alone. With reverence, I collected a wormy chunk.

His remarks had gone beyond his reconstruction from observable phenomena of a cover of ice across the whole of northern Europe: he had concluded that the newborn Alps, rising under the ice, had caused it to break up. Agassiz’s friend and mentor Alexander von Humboldt, whose name reposes in the western Americas in the Humboldt Current, the Humboldt River, and the Humboldt Range, strongly urged Agassiz to go co-working space amsterdam back to cataloguing fossil fishes, the work for which Agassiz was internationally known and for which the Geological Society of London had awarded him the Wollaston Medal. “You spread your intellect over too many subjects at once,” he wrote to Agassiz. “I think that you should concentrate . . . on fossil fishes. In so doing, you will render a greater service to positive geology than by these general considerations (a little icy withal) on the revolutions of the primitive world. . . . You will say that this is making you the slave of others; perfectly true, but such is the pleasing position of affairs here below. Have I not been driven for thirty-three years to busy myself with that tiresome America . . . ? Your ice frightens me.” Agassiz’s response was to address himself more intensively than ever to glaciers-glaciers of the co-working space leeuwarden present and the past. “Since I saw the glaciers I am quite of a snowy humor, and will have the whole surface of the earth covered with ice, and the whole prior creation dead by cold,” he wrote in English to an English geologist. “In fact I am quite satisfied that ice must be taken in every complete explanation of the last changes which occurred at the surface of Europe.” He found moraines on tl1e plains of France. He found Swedish boulders in Germany. In Grindelwald, a stranger heard his name and, seeing his boyish appearance, asked if he was the son of the great and famous professor. In i839, Agassiz went to the glaciers on tl1e apron of the Matterhorn, the glaciers under the Eiger and the Jungfrau. He walked up the Aar Glacier to the base of the Finsteraarhorn, the highest peak in the Bernese Oberland.

I remembered Leonard Harris-one day at their home in Laurel, Maryland-saying, “The Brevard Zone is the sort of fault you would see in any thrust belt. With the plate-tectonic model, anybody can write a history of an area without having been there. These people have no way to evaluate what they’re doing. They just make up stories.” “Plate-tectonic interpretations often start where data stop,” Anita had said. “These people will just float microplates around. If the West is made of microplates, where the hell was the landmass that produced the pieces?” “They want to be science-fiction writers,” Leonard said. “That’s what co-working space schiphol they want to do. They really look at it in a science-fiction mode. I have never been able to do that. If you don’t know what caused something, you don’t know; and that’s the way it is.” “Yeah, but it’s a much more romantic way to look at things,” she said. “And it certainly does tum students on.” “People love it.” “It allows them to play all kinds of games without the necessity and painstaking dogwork of gathering facts. It allows them to write papers without killing themselves getting data.” “People want the science-fiction story. It’s easier to believe that pieces of the world move than it is to see a sand grain move. The principal problem about interpreting the Appalachians is that there have been no available subsurface data in the Blue Ridge and Piedmont. All interpretations, up until i979, were based on what people thought was a rooted system. Their ideas were based on offshore data, where they had 3-D-you know, seismic data, magnetic data -and these data were co-working space groningen more or less applied onshore. The concepts were developed from the ocean to the land. Now that we are beginning to get subsurface data on land, we are testing their concepts. A lot of what people have been saying is not hanging together. Some of what they have said has hung together.” I said to them, “One would gather from the seismic lines that for a continent-to-continent collision you’d have to go pretty far east to find the suture.” “I don’t think you can go far east enough,” Anita said. “The oceanic basin is out there.” “When you start working on the shore and you look offshore, you’ve got an immediate problem,” Leonard said. “They tell us that the oldest ocean crust that has ever been found is Jurassic. Onshore, we have everything that’s ever been built-from the Precambrian on up. We have a continuum. We have something that has been preserved much longer.

For a hundred and fifty miles, we had been traversing country that was free of glacial drift. Nowhere to be seen were the tills1 and erratics, the drumlins and kames left behind by Wisconsinan ice. Like a lifted hem, the line of maximum advance had been up in New York State somewhere, but now, in westernmost Pennsylvania, the glacial front had billowed south, and where Interstate So meets the eightieth meridian we co-working space amsterdam again crossed the terminal moraine. Sign of
the ice was everywhere-the alien boulders in the woods, the directional scratches on the country rock, the unsorted gravels, cobbles, and sands. The signature of glaciation is as bold as John Hancock’s and as consistently recognizable wherever ice has moved across the solid earth. In the presence of the evidence, one has no difficulty imagining the arctic ambience, the high blue-white ice lobes thickening to the north, the white surface wide as the continent and swept by uninterrupted gales, the view in sunlight blinding, relieved only co-working space leeuwarden by isolated mountain summits, ice moving around them in the way that water slides past boulders in a stream. Welcome to Ohio. A sign in the median said “s TAY AwA KE! STAY ALIVE!” Ohio is not rich in roadcuts. It is a little less poor, however, than Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska, and before long we were running through burrowed marine shales and walls of lithified river sand. It was rippled Carboniferous sandstone. We were still in rock of that age, but gradually and imperceptibly we had been losing altitude since we climbed the Allegheny front. The eastern rim of the plateau had been more than two thousand feet above sea level, and by now we were down to half that, as we moved farther away from the ancestral mountains and their wedge of sediment thinned. We had come into the continent’s province of supreme tectonic calm, the Stable Interior Craton, where a thin veneer of sediment lies flat upon the stolid fundament, where the geology-even by geological standards-is exceptionally slow. “This is the most conservative part of the U.S.,” Anita said. ”I’ve often thought about it. The wildest, craziest people are in the most tectonically active places.”