Year 8 Day 165

I’ve found the end of the trench.

It’s been running pretty well parallel to the coastline, but both the northward trend of the coastline and the trench stopped with a jumble of mountains trending east-west, as far as such a jumble can be said to have a trend. The coast turned abruptly westward at almost the same latitude.

My geology is pretty shaky, but I checked the plate tectonics in the computer. If the trench is an incipient opening between two plates, as I suspect of the lake I live on, the jumble ahead, which looks very new and raw (geologically speaking) probably represents a plate colliding with the separating pair. A triple point.

Once again I went very high to survey the mountains ahead, and found some areas that merely looked crumpled and earthquake-prone, and others with some very odd looking erosional features. Although it is still hot and dry, I suspect from the vegetation I am in a winter-rain area. Allowing for the considerable elevation, this area may even be prone to snow in the winter.

Several of the trees have what looks like unripe fruits and nuts of varieties new to me. I will have to check them out later in the season, and perhaps bring some samples back to Rainbow. But on the whole, this mountainous plateau doesn’t look very hospitable.

Jarn’s Journal is supposedly the journal of a human-like alien who was stranded in Africa roughly 125,000 years ago. He has met a group of our ancestors (who much to his annoyance persist in treating him as a god) and has mapped the coastline of Africa. He is now mapping the Mediterranean. His Journal (a regular Friday feature) gives some of the back story of the Confederation in which my science fiction is set, and can be found on my author site.