468 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



GREAT EROSIONAL WORK OF WINDS 



By De. CHARLES R. KEYES 



DES MOINES, IA. 



AS in the eighteenth centuiy marine planation was one of the 

 notable discoveries in earth-study, and as in the last century the 

 theory of general peneplanation through stream-corrasion was one of 

 the grander conceptions of the age, so the recognition of desert wind- 

 scour as the principal among erosional agencies seems destined to take 

 its place among the first half-dozen great and novel thoughts which 

 shall especially distinguish geologic science of the twentieth century. 

 Under conditions of arid climate, by which more than one half of the 

 land-surface of our globe is profoundly influenced, eolian erosion ap- 

 pears to become, as recently aptly stated, more potent than stream- 

 corrasion, more constant than the washings of the rains, more extensive 

 and persistent than the encroachments of the sea. Both as a sculptur- 

 ing power and as a sedimentative agent the wind is thus in every way 

 comparable to erosion and deposition by river and by ocean. 



That it is possible for the universal disintegration of the rocks to 

 go on by means of insolation instead of through ordinary chemical 

 decay, that general and rapid exportation of rock-waste takes place 

 through the agency of the winds instead of through the movement of 

 waters, and that on the land deposition of wind-borne dusts in terranes 



Fig. 1. Typical Enisled Landscape, neah Wonder, Nevada ; displaying differential 



effects of general wind erosion. 



