TheBanyanTree: Dying Grass Moon

[Dale M. Parish]

Once someone learns my wife is a geology professor, or that we're
involved with Project JASON, I hear regular rebuffs on global warming.
Especially when they hear that next year's Project JASON theme is
'Monster Storms - Exploring The Powerful Forces Of Weather'

National Geographic sent a film crew and research scientist here this
week to film the local Southeast Texas 'Argonauts' as the students are
called in the JASON Project, in conducting experiments in forensic
hurricanology.  They caravaned down to Holly Beach and Cameron LA
yesterday to examine the damage left by Rita, then returned to Lamar
University's geology lab to evaluate some of the data they collected.
Lamar's geology students have been watching the Gulf Of Mexico take
two, then three, now four meters of beach every year since I've been
taking geology classes-- about 25 years now.  The rate of beach loss
is accelerating despite the State of Texas' efforts to slow it.  It's
inevitable-- the geologic function of a beach is to move.  Beaches are
not static.  Neither is the coast line.

My step-daughter-in-law was administratively deported earlier this
year through a paperwork SNAFU in all the legislative over-reaction to
panic against illegal terrorists.  We've been making regular jaunts to
Houston to pour resources into lawyers golf associations to get this
rectified.  As we drove back from Houston today, I mentioned to Johana
as we drove through a line of pine trees that crosses IH10 between
Winnie and Beaumont that the line of pines was the beach line 80,000
years ago.  She was incredulous at first, but knowing that her
mother-in-law's a geologist, she asked how and why.  I had to explain
to her that, throughout the nearly three and a half billion years of
geologic history that we can read, in only 10% of that time do we find
any evidence of glaciers on the planet.  In only three separate
periods with a total of about 300 million years do we find glaciers
here.  The other 90% of the time, the planet's temperature seems to
have been warm enough that there were no glaciers here.  The seas were
higher.  All the limestone laid down through the central plains of
North America was done during periods when that area was under the
sea.

Look at any exaggerated relief map of Texas and you'll notice the
coastal plains.  Leveled each time the sea rises and falls; new sand
and silt laid down each time the sea rises by the long-shore currents
from the rivers that empty into the Gulf.  There's a lot of the
population of Texas living in that corridor.  Houston, Beaumont,
Corpus Christi, Brownsville and the like will probably suffer a
watery grave, but the energy in the breakers will probably pulverize
everything that the salt water doesn't corrode away.

I can't help but wonder what kind of Atlantis legends will be spawned by 
our ancestors looking for undersea ruins.  ;-)

Hugs,
Dale
-- 
Dale M. Parish
628 Parish Rd
Orange TX 77632
parishdm at att.net