December 28, 2022 • 11 mins
Mesas, buttes and plateaus are all very similar. We'll break down the differences in each one just to be sure.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
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, Chuck does.
It's short Stuff. Let's go. So this had a recent
inspiration as well as the last one that we just
recorded about washer women. This one was Emily and I
(00:24):
for her birthday. Every year we go to a new
place that we've never been for a weekend. Uh it's
some place it'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 here been there? I don't think so. I may
(00:44):
have driven through, but it's possible it was a different
part of New Mexico. I'm not sure. Great town. UH
didn't know it, but it's like one of the art
capitals of the world. Uh. 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. Uh. Great
food to the best meals I've ever had in my life.
But on the drive from Albuquerque to Santa fe Emily
(01:07):
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 a and his wife from the Midwest. You know,
because it sounds like we're dummies that we didn't know
what this was, But you know what I said, I
think that's a mesa. I said, I think a mesa
(01:29):
is like a flat topped thing, and it is. And
now we're gonna talk about it. Yeah, all those road
Runner cartoons paid off finally. Yea, yeah, definitely. So um
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 sixteenth century Spanish
(01:51):
explorers slash conqui stores slash colonialists I guess, came up
from Mexico in search of Umu's city of gold called
the Seven Cities of Cibola, 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
(02:13):
really amazing geological features that no European had ever seen.
And one of the things that they slapped a label
on was those amazing maces that you saw. And again
they called it table because it's a flat top and
sides that drop off very steeply. That's right. Uh, you
can't talk about maces though, without talking about their flatheaded partners.
(02:34):
The beaute and the plateau and the beginning of the
nineteenth century is where the word beaute came from. Of course,
from the French. Uh. It is not a Spanish word
at all, but a beaute and a mesa. Depending on
how you talked to There may be a definition, like
a literal definition of size, like comparative size. But I
(02:57):
think generally you would just say it's a asa if
it is wider than it is tall, and it's abute
if it's taller than it is wide. That seems sensible
because some of these other ones get a little wonky,
like one one definition of mesas it has to have
a surface area of less than four square miles, Like
who can tell, Yeah, who's gonna get up their measure?
(03:19):
If you can look at that with a thumb, even
and be like that's a mesa, that's abute, Yes, 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 Mason,
I was completely off. Yeah. So let's 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
(03:40):
ask me. I agreed. Okay, Chuck, you have masa fever,
(04:14):
so I think you should kick this off. Well, I mean,
both of us love uh land forms, we love geographical
science and earth science, and it doesn't get any better
than maces and buttes and plateaus. My friend. Uh, these
are very very flat on top, and it is basically
due to the rock that is forming them. Uh, it's
(04:35):
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 Uh, that top rock, it's called
a cap rock, and it's 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 has warned
(04:58):
away over the years until it gets to that cap rock,
and then the cop rock says, no, I'm I'm not
going anywhere. I'm too hard to eroad. I may even
be hard and lava for all you know, but I'm
not going anywhere. I'm just gonna be flat, right. That's
not the story for the sedimentary rocks, though. Sedimentary rock
is laid in layers, made up of little particles of rock,
(05:21):
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 were
looking at is a piece of land that used to
(05:45):
be as tall as that keptn't 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 it's more water. You did mention when win
has a bit of an effect, but not nearly as
much as water. Uh, And you know it's just cool
like this, Uh, this great article points out that, and
(06:07):
this is one of my favorite things. When you get
a new land form from the million year erosion of
a different land form, like you end up getting something
else entirely. And that's the case with Mace's beauties and
plateaus um plateau. I don't fully get the difference between
a plateau and a mesa. Is it? Is it just
(06:28):
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 that 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
(06:50):
land that's pushed up, usually from um 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 um that part of the land.
(07:12):
A river might somehow spontaneously form in the rainy season. Um,
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, UM, it
takes a lot of that sedimentary rock, not the capstone,
but the sedimentary rock below it with it. Yeah, And
(07:34):
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 uh 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,
(07:56):
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,
(08:18):
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 like stream of water going and it wasn't
(08:40):
like straight up hill or anything, but it was going
up in 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, we'll just go up I guess,
I mean eventually found a place to go downhill. I
assume we didn't follow it, and we should have. Yeah,
you guys had your inner Bill Paxson and Helen Hunt.
(09:02):
They just didn't get fully engaged. I guess. But this water,
you know, 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 like, you know, 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's the river is going to
(09:25):
carve out the canyon. So that comes from a plateau
where it can and then the canyon can be further
divided into things like mesas and eventually beautes. And I think, Chuck,
I might be wrong, but I think abute is this
is uh you um, a younger No, an older mesa.
Wouldn't that be correct? Couldn't that be possible? I guess
(09:47):
because they're tallerant, thinner. Yeah, so it's possible that it's
just lost more off the sides than the mesa that
is nearby, because the Mason's say, hasn't it hasn't been
eroded as long as the ute. But regardless, if you
look at a mesa or a butte, it's it's got
the flat top. It also has the steep sides, but
then at the bottom it kind of slopes gracefully away
(10:10):
in either direction away from it. And um, 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. But that because it it's characteristic. Look, yeah,
and you know the best thing about this show is
(10:30):
someone who knows a lot more about Earth sciences than
we do. Well, hopefully right in and confirm you and say, yeah,
you were right on it, Josh, Yeah, I'd love hearing that.
Ori gently correct us, and we'll read that. I can't
stand that. Now we're fine with those What else you got?
I don't really have anything else. You got anything else? No?
(10:52):
I think that's it for Masa's ambutes 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
it's a great town. We missed the balloon festival, but
go down Canyon Road look at art and then the
big shout out to the restaurants, Geronimo and Sason. Literally
to the best meals I've ever had right there in
(11:13):
that little sleepy town in New Mexico. That's awesome. And
happy birthday to Emily too. Um And also I remember
now I haven't been to New Mexico. I was just
confused from watching Breaking Bad. That's right, Chuck laughed a
joke of mine, So that means short, stuffs out,
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, Chuck does.
It's short Stuff. Let's go. So this had a recent
inspiration as well as the last one that we just
recorded about washer women. This one was Emily and I
(00:24):
for her birthday. Every year we go to a new
place that we've never been for a weekend. Uh it's
some place it'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 here been there? I don't think so. I may
(00:44):
have driven through, but it's possible it was a different
part of New Mexico. I'm not sure. Great town. UH
didn't know it, but it's like one of the art
capitals of the world. Uh. 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. Uh. Great
food to the best meals I've ever had in my life.
But on the drive from Albuquerque to Santa fe Emily
(01:07):
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 a and his wife from the Midwest. You know,
because it sounds like we're dummies that we didn't know
what this was, But you know what I said, I
think that's a mesa. I said, I think a mesa
(01:29):
is like a flat topped thing, and it is. And
now we're gonna talk about it. Yeah, all those road
Runner cartoons paid off finally. Yea, yeah, definitely. So um
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 sixteenth century Spanish
(01:51):
explorers slash conqui stores slash colonialists I guess, came up
from Mexico in search of Umu's city of gold called
the Seven Cities of Cibola, 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
(02:13):
really amazing geological features that no European had ever seen.
And one of the things that they slapped a label
on was those amazing maces that you saw. And again
they called it table because it's a flat top and
sides that drop off very steeply. That's right. Uh, you
can't talk about maces though, without talking about their flatheaded partners.
(02:34):
The beaute and the plateau and the beginning of the
nineteenth century is where the word beaute came from. Of course,
from the French. Uh. It is not a Spanish word
at all, but a beaute and a mesa. Depending on
how you talked to There may be a definition, like
a literal definition of size, like comparative size. But I
(02:57):
think generally you would just say it's a asa if
it is wider than it is tall, and it's abute
if it's taller than it is wide. That seems sensible
because some of these other ones get a little wonky,
like one one definition of mesas it has to have
a surface area of less than four square miles, Like
who can tell, Yeah, who's gonna get up their measure?
(03:19):
If you can look at that with a thumb, even
and be like that's a mesa, that's abute, Yes, 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 Mason,
I was completely off. Yeah. So let's 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
(03:40):
ask me. I agreed. Okay, Chuck, you have masa fever,
(04:14):
so I think you should kick this off. Well, I mean,
both of us love uh land forms, we love geographical
science and earth science, and it doesn't get any better
than maces and buttes and plateaus. My friend. Uh, these
are very very flat on top, and it is basically
due to the rock that is forming them. Uh, it's
(04:35):
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 Uh, that top rock, it's called
a cap rock, and it's 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 has warned
(04:58):
away over the years until it gets to that cap rock,
and then the cop rock says, no, I'm I'm not
going anywhere. I'm too hard to eroad. I may even
be hard and lava for all you know, but I'm
not going anywhere. I'm just gonna be flat, right. That's
not the story for the sedimentary rocks, though. Sedimentary rock
is laid in layers, made up of little particles of rock,
(05:21):
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 were
looking at is a piece of land that used to
(05:45):
be as tall as that keptn't 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 it's more water. You did mention when win
has a bit of an effect, but not nearly as
much as water. Uh, And you know it's just cool
like this, Uh, this great article points out that, and
(06:07):
this is one of my favorite things. When you get
a new land form from the million year erosion of
a different land form, like you end up getting something
else entirely. And that's the case with Mace's beauties and
plateaus um plateau. I don't fully get the difference between
a plateau and a mesa. Is it? Is it just
(06:28):
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 that 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
(06:50):
land that's pushed up, usually from um 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 um that part of the land.
(07:12):
A river might somehow spontaneously form in the rainy season. Um,
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, UM, it
takes a lot of that sedimentary rock, not the capstone,
but the sedimentary rock below it with it. Yeah, And
(07:34):
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 uh 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,
(07:56):
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,
(08:18):
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 like stream of water going and it wasn't
(08:40):
like straight up hill or anything, but it was going
up in 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, we'll just go up I guess,
I mean eventually found a place to go downhill. I
assume we didn't follow it, and we should have. Yeah,
you guys had your inner Bill Paxson and Helen Hunt.
(09:02):
They just didn't get fully engaged. I guess. But this water,
you know, 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 like, you know, 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's the river is going to
(09:25):
carve out the canyon. So that comes from a plateau
where it can and then the canyon can be further
divided into things like mesas and eventually beautes. And I think, Chuck,
I might be wrong, but I think abute is this
is uh you um, a younger No, an older mesa.
Wouldn't that be correct? Couldn't that be possible? I guess
(09:47):
because they're tallerant, thinner. Yeah, so it's possible that it's
just lost more off the sides than the mesa that
is nearby, because the Mason's say, hasn't it hasn't been
eroded as long as the ute. But regardless, if you
look at a mesa or a butte, it's it's got
the flat top. It also has the steep sides, but
then at the bottom it kind of slopes gracefully away
(10:10):
in either direction away from it. And um, 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. But that because it it's characteristic. Look, yeah,
and you know the best thing about this show is
(10:30):
someone who knows a lot more about Earth sciences than
we do. Well, hopefully right in and confirm you and say, yeah,
you were right on it, Josh, Yeah, I'd love hearing that.
Ori gently correct us, and we'll read that. I can't
stand that. Now we're fine with those What else you got?
I don't really have anything else. You got anything else? No?
(10:52):
I think that's it for Masa's ambutes 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
it's a great town. We missed the balloon festival, but
go down Canyon Road look at art and then the
big shout out to the restaurants, Geronimo and Sason. Literally
to the best meals I've ever had right there in
(11:13):
that little sleepy town in New Mexico. That's awesome. And
happy birthday to Emily too. Um And also I remember
now I haven't been to New Mexico. I was just
confused from watching Breaking Bad. That's right, Chuck laughed a
joke of mine, So that means short, stuffs out,
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