A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1133 entries
basin and range
A landscape of parallel mountain ranges separated by flat desert valleys — the defining topography of the interior American West from eastern California to central Utah, and from southern Idaho to northern Mexico. The ranges are horsts; the valleys are grabens. The earth’s crust is stretching, pulling apart, and the landscape is cracking into long, north-south strips of mountain and basin, mountain and basin, repeated for a thousand miles. The phrase names both the landform and the geological province.
Etymology
Basin, from Old French bacin (from Late Latin bacchinon, “water vessel”) + range, from Old French range (“row, line,” from rangier, “to place in a row”). A descriptive American geologic term coined in the 19th century for the alternating rows of down-dropped basins and uplifted ranges.