Hard Road West Quotes

“We live and we die, but we are made of sterner stuff. The carbon atoms in our fingernails, the calcium in our bones, the iron atoms in our blood -- all the countless trillions of atoms of which we are made -- are ancient objects. They existed before us, before the Earth itself, in fact. And after each of us dies, they will depart from our bodies and do other things. Forever.”
― Keith Heyer Meldahl, Hard Road West: History and Geology along the Gold Rush Trail

“We live and die, but we are made of immortal stuff. The carbon atoms in our fingernails, the calcium atoms in our bones, the iron atoms in our blood—all of the countless trillions of atoms of which we are made—are ancient objects. They existed before us, before the Earth itself, in fact. And after each of us dies, they will depart from our bodies and do other things. Forever.”
― Keith Heyer Meldahl, Hard Road West: History and Geology along the Gold Rush Trail

“out of the ground at nearly two times the global average. Throughout the Basin and Range, heat pours out of the crust at rates that average 50 percent higher than typical for the rest of the Earth. This tells us that hot mantle lies close to the surface below the Basin and Range. Since hot rock is inclined to rise buoyantly, it seems likely that the mantle under the Basin and Range is bulging and spreading like a growing mushroom. This hot, rising mantle both stretches the crust and sustains the high elevations. Taking advantage of the thinned and broken crust above, mantle-derived magmas have jetted upward to stain the Basin and Range landscape with innumerable lava flows and volcanic cones. So, an immense—and ongoing—outpouring of mantle heat appears to have made the Basin and Range and kept it standing high. But what made the heat? For that we turn to the Farallon Plate. IN CHAPTER 7 we saw how the subduction of the Farallon Plate”
― Keith Heyer Meldahl, Hard Road West: History and Geology along the Gold Rush Trail

“standing as wave-battered islands in between. As it turns out though, the Earth knows more than one way to hold up a mountain belt. In the Basin and Range—and perhaps in other areas of the West—it is heat, not crustal thickness, that makes the region stand high. The hottest part of the Basin and Range lies below Battle Mountain, a town of 2,800 people and not many fewer billboards straddling Interstate 80 and the Humboldt River in north-central Nevada. The town lies on top of the Battle Mountain High, a 100-mile-wide bull’s-eye where heat seeps”
― Keith Heyer Meldahl, Hard Road West: History and Geology along the Gold Rush Trail

“The Basin and Range Province is one of the mostly highly stretched places on Earth. If you add up all the displacements on all the faults that divide the basins from the ranges between Reno and Salt Lake City, you come up with 250 miles of east-west extension. Given that Reno and Salt Lake City now lie 450 miles apart, that means that east-west stretching has more than doubled the width of the crust. A map of California shows how the coastline bulges into the Pacific Ocean. The east-west stretching of Nevada and Utah pushed it out there. During Basin and Range stretching, a 400-mile-long block of granite that once lay near Las Vegas was pulled 150 miles west and tilted up into the air. Today we call it the Sierra”
― Keith Heyer Meldahl, Hard Road West: History and Geology along the Gold Rush Trail