THE DYNAMIC EARTH: A BLOG ABOUT GEOLOGY AND THE EARTH SCIENCES

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Lower Mississippi Valley Geomorph

Google informs me that it is ol' Mark Twain's 176th Birthday today, so a quick post pointing out some pretty nifty Mississippi River research seems appropriate today.  The Army Corps of Engineers has a pretty nice Lower Mississippi Mapping Project webpage that provides access to a classic of the Mississippi River literature: Fisk's 1944 report "Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River" in pdf form.  It's a classic piece of geo-literature, and was the culmination of a pretty exhaustive survey and mapping project carried out in the Lower Miss. River.  What's EXTRA rad, of course, is the fact that they've also scanned the completely awesome PLATES that went with the report!  Here's a small example below, although the scanned versions are full sized (something like 15 in x 20 in, or so, I reckon):



The plates are color coded for different ages of point bar migration, chute cut-offs, and avulsions, and pretty much succinctly present the whole complicated story of channelbelt evolution in this portion of the lower Mississippi River Valley.  It's a pretty cool resource to have access to, and makes for some pretty posters, as well.

And, while I'm sure everyone enjoys some classic Mississippi River Science on Twain's Birthday, I reckon folks oughta' read SOMETHING by ol' Twain...so here's a link to "The War Prayer", which pretty much says it all, really.  Enjoy!

1 comment:

Terrell K. Williams said...

I like how you went from a science related post to a political post at the end. Twain was and is always spot on!!