Geology of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park and Potomac River Corridor, District of Columbia, Maryland, West Virginia, and Virginia

摘要

This is history on a vast scale, of colliding continents, mountains that rise and crumble, and finally the emergence of a river. Ultimately people become part of the narrative-men with big ideas about turning the rocks and the riverrnto their own ends. And so the geological story becomes intertwined with the course of human events.rnIn this engaging and content-packed book, the authors take the reader up anticlines and down synclines, telling how magma thrust itself through metasedimentary deposits, finally to be blasted to pieces by crews building the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal along the Potomac River. The new canal would spearhead a new nation's western destiny. But its construction was hard and dangerous: "The men roped themselves to trees or hung over cliffs and used sledgehammers to pound steel rods held by other trustworthy men" (p.23).