Strata

Strata

The world is a pretty amazing place. The forces of nature are just too large to fully comprehend. Through the ages the rivers carry the sands and other materials from the land, and carry it to the sea. There it is laid down as layer after layer of materials like the layers in a cake. Compression, heat and time will often force these layers into a hard material we might call rock. In this case we have layers of clay material compressed into a soft rock called shale. The geologic forces of this area pushed the shale rock high above the sea, and tilted the original layers (the ones to the right in the photo) to a near vertical from their original horizontal. These were then worn down by new erosion and again submerged. During this subsequent submersion new layers were built up onto the older vertical layers of the cake, these are the ones to the left. Again geologic forces raised the rock from the sea, and again lilted it so that neither set of layers is in it's original configuration. This just goes to show that we as a small life form on Earth cannot ever expect to have anything we build truly last forever. Even concrete has an expected life of two hundred years, (although it will last longer if properly mixed and cured). The Incas built some wondrous water systems a thousand years ago. But unfortunately, the same forces that raised the massive mountains that honed their engineering skills, also caused the water systems to have to be revised and re-engineered through the decades and centuries they were in use as the mountains were continually pushed even higher, changing the way the water ran along the aqueducts they constructed.