Old man river...

[Enzo]

A little piece in today's paper said that a satellite GPR has found an ancient large riverbed under the sand in the Sahara. Well seems to me we knew of this decades ago. Interesting, yes, but not news. I looked to see.

http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/p ... 01385.html

http://planetearth.nerc.ac.uk/news/story.aspx?id=200

I found references as far back as the 1980s, but I could swear I was reading about it in the 1960s.

Over here we have the ancient river Teays, that drained the Ohio area pre-glaciation.

I guess I am a sucker for old man river. I may have taken too many geomorphology classes in college. And a couple terms of air photo interpretation. Don't ask me what I thought I would do with that learning. When we drive or ride through the Appalachians, wring has to listen to me lecture on the landforms and how it came to be that a river managed to cut through a mountain range.

[Lance]

That bugs me too. You hear "news" confirming something you knew years ago...

[Lianachan]

I've done some geomorphology too. In the summer, I took a sample from a few metres depth in a peat bank overlying an ancient river bed using a peat corer. These things grab a sample about an inch wide, and amazingly it contained a complete, perfectly preserved pine cone sitting the right way up in it. I don't know what the chances of plucking that so perfectly out of the ground in a randomly selected spot were, but pretty slim I would guess. It did allow us to pretty firmly date the peat at that depth, though.