Fault Line - A GeoJournal

     The hole was huge. Gaping, even. From one side to the other it yawned wide in the Earth, fifty feet or more across and deep enough that even the boys of the neighborhood, usually so bold and ready to tackle whatever danger they could find, were dutifully minding their mothers’ instructions to keep their distance. Staring down into the abyss one could see the glint of metal pipes and the jagged concrete which had come from the street previously occupying the space where the hole had developed early that morning. One young girl, remembering a trip to some caves out West the Summer previous and time spent playing amongst stalagmites and stalactites (though she could never remember which was which) had tried to scout around the edge of the cavernous collapse to look for geodes, before being pulled back by her father and sent to her room. Even now as the police placed yellow tape and blockades around the hole, a few brave souls tried to free themselves from the grip of concerned parent

       There is a wilderness trail which runs through the outskirts of Austin, Tx. Being from Houston, I don't really think all that much of Austin. As my uncle likes to say, "we don't claim them." That said, I have been on the Shoal Creek Trail, and it really is beautiful. Central Texas is one of the most amazing places on Earth, in my opinion, and walking through the green hills of Shoal Creek is enough to put one's worried heart at ease.  Texas is not, overall, a state with much variation in elevation. Truth be told, aside from the "hill country," Texas is pretty flat. Thus, we don't have to deal with landslides very often unlike a more mountainous state like Idaho or Colorado. This means that when they do happen, they tend to take residents completely by surprise and cost local governments quite a lot of money. Such is the case with the Shoal Creek Landslide that happened in May of 2018. A large rain event led to oversaturation of ground which de

The Science of Religion       There is truth. At least, I assume that there is. I know that I exist and that I'm capable of acknowledging my existence, which tells me that there is some kind of greater truth which creates the state in which I am capable of existing and comprehending things. Therefore I assume that there is truth. And as I have been gifted with five major senses and a mind, I assume that the truths which I can understand are those in the sensible world interpreted by the mental. As far as sources of truth go, there is truth determined purely by reasoning, truth interpreted from observations, truth tested through means which I determine to be empirical, and truth given to me by a trusted source, whom I assume has his or her own ways of knowing whar is, in fact, true. There is one truth which covers all of these bases: the existence of God.       I can reason the existence of God through presumptions about the functions of the universe in which I live. For instance, a

       My Uncle in Georgia has a really odd countertop in his kitchen. It isn't granite, it isn't marble, it isn't even Gneiss. Instead, it's a rock called Soapstone. I've found a picture which bears a striking resemblance to his countertop, though he only has the drainage lines on one side, and I gotta say: it's weird looking. I can't say exactly what it reminds me of--my first though is "slab" but given that it actually is a slab of rock that's not very helpful--but it makes me think of those black tables from highschool science lab. I've never been very fond of it, but my Uncle loves it and swears it's the best countertop he's ever had. So I was curious what made it such a good building material for countertops. Delving into the topic for the sake of this entry, I discovered some pretty interesting stuff!      Soapstone is a fascinating rock. First of all, it's got a lot of talc in it. If you remember way back in Module 1, we