The porch we love looks mostly to the southwest towards Lucerene and Geneva. The mountains that appeared this lovely afternoon were more to the east meaning that they were more directly south of us and towards Milan, Italy. Gradually, as the sun set a huge wall of granite apeared and the sun lit up the rock face and clouds above with pink hues.
A slight shift to the right has us looking toward Lucerne and what I call the "haystack" of Pilatus that is very near the city of Lucerne. The grandness of these hills were reminicient of the Sierras.
Not too far across the the Zurichsee that we were on yesterday, the low hills suddenly change to massive granite plutons that have been pushed up from the collision of the African plate into the European plateau. It was intesting to think that we were looking at ancient rocks from the Tethys Sea. I remember that there was a discovery here in the Alps by a geologist who began to understand why there were fossils up in the mountains we were graced with today."In 1893, using fossil records from the Alps and Africa, Eduard Suess proposed the theory that an inland sea had once existed between Laurasia and the continents which formed Gondwana II. In this moment of Earth's life, however, these two continental masses were united in a unique supercontinent, known as Gondwana III or Pangaea. He named it the 'Tethys Sea' after the Greek sea goddess Tethys. When the theory of plate tectonics became established in the 1960s it became clear Suess's "sea" had in fact been an ocean. Plate tectonics also provided the mechanism by which the former ocean disappeared. In plate tectonic theory oceanic crust can subduct under continental crust" Accessed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tethys_Ocean
And a lovely ocean floor it is!
M
No comments:
Post a Comment