#sedimentation
The extreme flatness of the Northeastern China Manchurian Plain has caused the Songhua River to meander widely over time. The result of the meandering is that the river is surrounded by a wide plain filled with swirls and curves, showing paths the river once took. The plain includes classic features of meandering rivers, such as ox-bow lakes—semi-circular lakes formed when a meander is cut off from the main channel by river-deposited sediment. Meandering rivers shift their positions across the valley bottom by depositing sediment on the inside of bends while simultaneously eroding the outer banks of the meander bends.
The area in this picture is about 32 kilometers by 41 kilometers.
Image from NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and the U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team
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The names of minerals and the minerals themselves do not differ from each other, because at the bottom of both the material and the print is the beginning of an abysmal number of fissures. Words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax of splits and ruptures. Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults, into a terrain of particles each containing its own void. This discomforting language of fragmentation offers no easy gestalt solution; the certainties of didactic discourse are hurled into the erosion of the poetic principle. Poetry being forever lost must submit to its own vacuity; it is somehow a product of exhaustion rather than creation. Poetry is always a dying language but never a dead language.
—Robert Smithson,A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Proposals
