CompuServe Messages

Kamron, >> The water seeks a short cut and once the river had cut lower on one side of the tower it would never find it easier to return again over the high side let alone do this over and over back and forth creating the massive tower. << Never? Never say never, Kamron — Nature has a funny way of proving such claims wrong with monotonous regularity. <g> Consider this scenario: River follows path of least resistance, and cuts a valley or even a canyon in soft rock to one side of a tower of harder rock, maybe an igneous intrusion. By and by, you have the river, then the igneous tower, then sedimentary rock all round the rest of the tower. Now you have an earthquake — say, a strike-slip type quake with most of the motion horizontal. Say you get a big fracture right along the border between the sedimentary rock and the igneous rock. Say that fracture leads into the riverbed upstream and downstream of the igenous tower, and bottoms out just below the upstream riverbed. Then the river, always following the path of least resistance, will quit flowing on the one side of the tower and start flowing on the other side. Allow another few million years for erosion, and you wind up with the tower sitting alone with a river on one side and an empty ex-riverbed on the other side. Modify this scenario a bit, and you could easily get the river flowing on both sides of the tower. Jon W.