A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1083 entries
bornhardt
A bald dome of rock rising abruptly out of a plain, steep-sided, shedding curved slabs off itself like the layers of an onion, and meeting the flat ground at a sharp angle rather than in a skirt of rubble. The convention puts it at thirty meters and up. Uluru is one, so are the granite domes of Yosemite, the Georgia monadnocks, the sugarloaves of Rio, and the tors of Zimbabwe and Namibia.
Etymology
Named for Wilhelm Bornhardt, the German geologist and mining engineer who surveyed German East Africa in the 1890s and described these domes in 1900. Bornhardt himself did not coin this word — he coined inselberg, island mountain, for isolated massifs generally. The American geologist Bailey Willis proposed bornhardt in 1936 for the specific dome-shaped kind, in his honor. The two terms overlap but are not the same: a bornhardt need not be isolated, and plenty of inselbergs are not domes.
Notes
The rounding is exfoliation. Granite forms under enormous pressure, and as the rock above it is stripped away it expands and splits along curved fractures parallel to the surface, so it sheds shells. The dome shape is not carved from outside — it is the rock relaxing.