7/25/2023 0 Comments Perfectly clear turrell![]() Off-road vehicles razorblade some earthmovers gut others for landscaping and building material and to grit icy roads. In 1928, Sunset Crater was designated a national monument - when a Hollywood movie company wanted to blow it to pieces to simulate a landslide for a Zane Grey adaptation - but most neighboring cones still lack protection. This pool will immerse you in the pulsing, birthing, unbounded universe.Īlthough the plate continues to drift, the once volatile field now lies dormant, monitored by geologists armed with seismographs. ![]() Out of control, the blaze quickly merged with the underground hearth of Maasawu, god of fire and death a red gash split the earth like an overripe melon, raining end times upon people. Their myths recall a vengeful katsina - a genius loci with a flame-colored, tube-snout head - that ignited a mountaintop because sorcerers wronged him. Ancestral Hopi, who witnessed the flare-up and attendant mushroom cloud from their distant mesas, consigned the spectacle to collective memory. (Archaeologists determined the date by analyzing growth rings of wooden roof beams buried under volcanic debris.) Terrified, the local Sinagua abandoned the cornfields they had farmed for generations. Near the apex of Highway 89, Sunset Crater marks this ground’s most recent violent birthing, which occurred during the late fall or winter of CE 1064-1065. With the crust steadily inching northeastward, volcanoes boiled up, geysered, and fizzled, and the San Francisco Volcanic Field stretched taffy-like into a fifty-mile belt of more than six hundred vents. While this sector of the North American tectonic plate was sliding across a hotspot in the planet’s mantle, molten rock pushed through fissures and cracks, oozing from the surface, or, mixed with gases, lobbing fiery mayhem mile-high. ![]() The blond grasslands appear torched, hardened with lava veins, blackened with pustules and scabs like charred skin. Photo by Luciano Zoratti.Īny landscape is composed not only of what lies before our eyes, but what lies in our heads.Īs you drive south from the Cameron trading post, toward Flagstaff, Arizona and the southwestern rim of the Colorado Plateau, cinder and jagged basalt oust the Painted Desert’s sinuous shale. ![]()
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