A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
flowstone
Flowstone is the sheet of calcite laid down where water runs across a cave wall or floor rather than dripping from a point. Dripping water builds stalactites and stalagmites; running water builds curtains, draperies, terraces, and smooth glazed slopes that look poured. It is banded in cross-section, and the bands hold a record of the climate outside the cave at the time each layer formed.
Etymology
The word is a plain English compound coined by cavers and geologists in the nineteenth century, and it is one of a set built the same way and just as literally: dripstone, rimstone, cave popcorn, moonmilk, and soda straw. Caving vocabulary tends to be blunt and descriptive because it was made by people underground looking at the thing rather than by anyone with a dictionary.
Notes
Flowstone bands are used the way tree rings are. Each layer can be dated by the decay of uranium in the calcite, and the chemistry within a layer records rainfall and temperature at the surface, so a cave in a dry region can hold a continuous climate record running back hundreds of thousands of years.