There is a way of looking at a pond that changes it from a fixed feature into a process with a direction.
The ordinary view treats a pond as a…
Weathering does not attack rock evenly. It finds cracks, corners and weaknesses, and the shapes left standing are whatever it could not reach. Here are seventeen.
1. The Rock Was…
There is a category of living thing that is truly difficult to classify, and lichens are the standard example.
The difficulty is not that they are obscure. They are everywhere…
Wet ground forms where water arrives faster than it leaves. What happens afterwards - what grows, what was cut, what sank and what is buried - is all legible from…
Ice does two things to a landscape: it removes material from where it flows and deposits it where it stops. Almost every feature below is one of those two, and…
There is a picture most people have of a watermill that misses the part that mattered.
The picture is a wheel turning in a river, driven by the current —…