Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Mesas: Flat

Episode Date: December 28, 2022

Mesas, buttes and plateaus are all very similar. We'll break down the differences in each one just to be sure.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-Pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Go to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Dave's here again, which makes this a special edition of short stuff. Don't you feel special? I do. Chuck does his short stuff. Let's go.

So this had a recent inspiration as well as the last one that we just recorded about Washerwomen, this one was Emily and I, for her birthday every year, we go to a new place that we've never been for a weekend. Oh yeah, nice. It's someplace that's not, you know, obviously super far because it's like a long weekend. And we look at a map and just say like, this looks interesting. And this year it was Santa Fe, New Mexico. Awesome.

Highly recommend. Have you ever been there? I don't think so. I may have driven through, but it's possible it was a different part of New Mexico. I'm not sure. It's a great town, didn't know it, but it's like one of the art capitals of the world. There's a road called Canyon Road where there's literally a hundred plus galleries and you just start at one end and start walking.

Great food, two of the best meals I've ever had in my life, but on the drive from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, Emily looked over at the expanse and said, what's that big flat mountain over there? And there's like a few of them. And I went, I don't know. And then I went, wait a minute. And this is a kid from the south and his wife from the Midwest, you know, because it sounds like we're dummies that we didn't know what this was.

But I went, you know what? I said, I think that's a mesa. I said, I think a mesa is like a flat topped thing and it is, and now we're going to talk about it. Yep. All those Roadrunner cartoons paid off, finally. Yeah. Those were masas, I guess, huh?

Yeah, definitely. So the mesa is named after the table and it's a Spanish word for table. And the reason that it has a Spanish name is because in the 16th century, Spanish explorers slash conquistadors slash colonialists, I guess, came up from Mexico in search of a city of gold called the Seven Cities of Cebola, which I had never heard of, but it's basically akin to El Dorado. And of course they didn't find it because those kind of lost cities of gold don't actually exist, but they did see some really amazing geological features that no European had ever

seen. And one of the things that they slapped a label on was those amazing masas that you saw. And again, they call it table because it's a flat top and sides that drop off very steeply. That's right. You can't talk about masas, though, without talking about their flat headed partners, the butte and the plateau, and beginning of the 19th century is where the word butte came from, of course, from the French.

It is not a Spanish word at all. Butte and a mesa, depending on who you talk to, there may be a definition, like a literal definition of size, like comparative size, but I think generally you would just say it's a mesa if it is wider than it is tall, and it's a butte if it's taller than it is wide. That seems sensible because some of these other ones get a little wonky. Like one definition of mesa is it has to have a surface area of less than four square miles. Like who can tell? Yeah.

Who's going to get up there and measure? If you can look at that with a thumb even and be like, that's a mesa, that's a butte. Yes. Exactly. And impress your friends who aren't from the Southwest. Yeah. I'm just glad I got it right because I would have felt like a real dummy if I would have said mesa and I was completely off.

Yeah. So let's take a break, an early break, and come back and talk about how these things form, okay, because it's pretty interesting if you ask me. Agreed. I'm Mangesh Atkala, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology.

And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good.

There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change, too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay Chuck, you have Mesa Fever, so I think you should kick this off. Well, I mean, both of us love landforms, we love geographical science and earth science, and it doesn't get any better than Mesa's and Butte's and Plateau's, my friend.

These are very, very flat on top. And it is basically due to the rock that is forming them. It's sedimentary rock and it's accumulated. This isn't something that happens in an instant. It happens over millions of years, these things are formed. But that top rock, it's called a cap rock, and it's flat on top because it is eroded down to that level. It didn't used to look like that.

It used to probably be more pointy, like a mountain or something. But it is worn away over the years till it gets to that cap rock. And then the cap rock says, no, I'm not going anywhere, I'm too hard to erode, I may even be hard in lava for all you know, but I'm not going anywhere, I'm just going to be flat. That's not the story for the sedimentary rocks though. Sedimentary rock is laid in layers made up of little particles of rock. And it's pretty hard, but the old saying live by the particle, die by the particle has never been truer when it comes to sedimentary rock because it can be weathered back into particles

depending on whether it's exposed to water or wind, that kind of thing. And when you step back and look at a mesa, what you're looking at is a piece of land that used to be as tall as that capstone that isn't now because over millions of years, water has run down the sides and carved a bunch of it, including the surrounding landscape away. Yeah, and it's more water, you did mention wind. Wind has a bit of an effect, but not nearly as much as water. And you know, it's just cool, like this great article points out that, and this is one of

my favorite things when you get a new landform from the million-year erosion of a different landform. Yeah. Like you end up getting something else entirely. And that's the case with mesa's buttes and plateaus. Plateau, I don't fully get the difference between a plateau and a mesa. Is it just that a plateau only has to have one side that's eroded? Yeah, it's like the difference between a peninsula and an island, but land on land.

Okay. Well, that makes sense. Yeah. And the cool thing is, is the plateau is the grandfather of mesa's and buttes, right? Yeah. I mean, the plateau came around first. Right. So it's this piece of land that's pushed up usually from magma that wants to break through

the earth's crust, but can't find a weak enough spot. But it's so strong and there's so much pressure. It actually pushes up a pretty good-sized chunk of the earth, at least on one side. Now you have yourself a plateau, but there may have been a river on that part of the land, a river might somehow spontaneously form in the rainy season. There's a lot of ways that water can end up on a plateau. And as it does, it wants off that plateau. It wants back to sea level as fast as it can go.

And as it moves, it takes a lot of that sedimentary rock, not the capstone, but the sedimentary rock below it with it. Yeah. And here's the thing with rain out there. It's not like rain here in the deep south where there's all this rich soil that just soaks all up and it rains for three days and somehow still never floods because the land is just drinking it up. Those arid landscapes out there, the rain comes in very hard and very fast and generally

leaves pretty fast. And it's very intense and the water isn't, or the ground isn't soaking it up like it is with this rich soil that we have. So I remember being out west, seeing a storm coming from the distance, because you can see forever out there, and me and my buddy Brett going, man, that looks ominous. And it got closer and closer and closer until we were right in the middle of it and saw sideways rain, saw telephone poles being, it was almost a tornado literally being ripped up and falling across the road in front of us.

And we stopped and got out. It was so scary. And we saw, I'll never forget it. We saw water running uphill. Oh yeah, I've heard this story. I don't know how to explain it, but we saw a definite stream of water going, and it wasn't like straight uphill or anything, but it was going up an incline. And I guess that was just a testament to how much water there was and it was looking for

a place to be. Right. It couldn't go downhill, so it was like, well, I'll just go up, I guess. I mean, eventually found a place to go downhill, I assume. We didn't follow it. We should have. Sure. If you guys had your inner bill packs and in Helen Hunt, they just didn't get fully

engaged, I guess. But this water, it carries with it a lot of loose sediment, and the faster it's running, like it eventually becomes a river, and it's just carrying these larger and larger pieces of rock and sediment, that's where your money erosion is going to happen to the point where one day you may have like, oh, I don't know, a grand canyon. Yeah. So that river is going to carve out the canyon, so that comes from a plateau where it can. And then the canyon can be further divided into things like Mesa's and eventually Butte's.

And I think, Chuck, I might be wrong, but I think a Butte is a younger, no, an older Mesa. Maybe. Wouldn't that be correct? Couldn't that be possible? I guess because they're taller and thinner. Yeah. So it's possible that it's just lost more off the sides than the Mesa that is nearby did,

because the Mesa's say it hasn't been eroded as long as the Butte. But regardless, if you look at a Mesa or a Butte, it's got the flat top. It also has the steep sides, but then at the bottom, it kind of slopes gracefully away in either direction, away from it. And the reason why is because that sedimentary rock that that flash flooding and flash upward flowing water takes with it, kind of deposits a lot of it at the bottom, at the base of the Mesa or the Butte, and that gives it its characteristic look. Yeah.

And you know, the best thing about this show is someone who knows a lot more about earth sciences than we do will hopefully write in and confirm you and say, yeah, you were right on it, Josh. Yeah. I'd love hearing that. Or gently correct us and we'll read that. I can't stand that. No, we're fine with those.

What else you got? I don't really have anything else. You got anything else? No, I think that's it for Mesa's and Butte's for now. Who knows? Maybe we'll learn more about it someday and come back. Shout out Santa Fe. Go check it out.

It's a great town. We missed the balloon festival, but go down Canyon Road, look at art, and then big shout out to the restaurants, Geronimo and Cezanne, literally two of the best meals I've ever had right there in that little sleepy town in Mexico. That's awesome. And happy birthday to Emily, too. And also, I remember now, I haven't been to New Mexico. I was just confused from watching Breaking Bad.

That's right. Look laughed at a joke of mine, so that means short stuff's out.