Dip, not stuff you put in your mouth, chew, and then spit, and not a road hazard.
Strike, not missing a pitched ball, knocking down bowling pins, beginning to play a tune, bombing, or hitting.
Plunge, not falling or diving, and not a dress neckline revealing cleavage.*
But other dips, strikes, and plunges: geologic ones, specifically, the terms used for the analysis of geological structures.
Dip, strike, and plunge are geologic terms for the orientations of folded and faulted rocks. Dip: think opened book left page-side down on a coffee table while the reader gets a refill of coffee; the two sides slant away from the central spine; that’s dip. Strike: think compass direction of the book’s spine; that’s strike. Plunge: picture one end of that open book resting partly on a large coffee table book, inclining the spine; that’s plunge. Faulted and folded rocks have orientations that are similar, and the folded ones can even be pictured as an upside-down open book with those same three orientations.
Here’s the point: In a three-dimensional universe, we are accustomed to seeing the orientations of everything physical, even when we might not personally know a set of descriptors for those orientations. We see orientations, but most of us do not quantify by angles in horizontal or vertical planes. And that’s okay for everyday living. Just recognizing the way something is oriented is sufficient for safety: “Remember that the ramp is slippery when wet.”
If you live in a tree-shrouded humid area underlain by relatively undisturbed, flat-lying layers of sedimentary rocks or in an area of massive granitic batholiths, you won’t see many features to which you might apply dip, strike, and plunge. But in mountainous regions like the Himalayas, the Alps, the Rockies, the Andes, and the Appalachians, or on a tectonically squeezed island like Crete,** orientations of broken and folded rocks can be spectacular, and they reveal the history of shaping forces.
Anyway, this is about orientations. Wherever you find faulted and folded rocks, you might be amazed by the power required to do the faulting and folding. There are, of course, local compressive and tensional stresses, but the most spectacular of the folds are generally the product of movements by the large tectonic plates on which continents move. Slamming India into southern Asia has both raised the Tibetan Plateau and folded rocks in the Himalayas. So, when you think orientations, think of both local and overriding regional (or even worldwide) forces.
And the same applies to religious, social, philosophical, and political orientations. We are subject to forces on different scales, and we have all been bent and twisted by forces external to ourselves. Often, because of forces beyond our control, we tilt one way or another, warp this way or that, or incline toward or away from. We even separate and move relative to religious, social, philosophical, and political entities to which we have been long attached. But even if we ignore those religious, social, philosophical, and political tectonics that have shaped our lives on a grand scale, we still have to contend with the emotional tectonics that manifest themselves in our gut responses to circumstances. What forces shaped those emotional responses?
All of us can profit from applying the principles of structural geology to our lives. Structural geologists analyze the direction and strength of forces and their resultant effects on rocks. Compressive forces push rocks together; tensional forces pull them apart. Pushed together under great power, rocks can rise, fold, and sometimes fault (move). Pulled apart, rocks can fault and drop to form down-dropped basins.
How would we profit? We need to ask ourselves whether or not the forces that shaped our orientations were compressive or tensional. Both? Probably, we’ll all find that in our most recognizable and fundamental characteristics, we exhibit a history of those forces, just as the dipping and plunging rocks do along strikes. We are all that opened book. Our characteristics are those pages and covers that attach to a spine with a specific strike and plunge, sometimes with rips and creases.
Want to understand yourself a bit better? Do some structural analysis.
*Plunging necklines aside, cleavage is also revealed in the way a mineral or rock splits.
**See folded rocks at https://www.google.com/search?q=pics+of+geology+of+Crete&client=safari&rls=en&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=SuHmWXZ7Dg7VzM%253A%252Cswlme0bHef_rSM%252C_&usg=__ruq4B5HKT0qNBcauhp6p4gPZE4g%3D&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjn-9e7ufXXAhWCl-AKHa4WCQgQ9QEIKTAA#imgrc=SuHmWXZ7Dg7VzM:
Strike, not missing a pitched ball, knocking down bowling pins, beginning to play a tune, bombing, or hitting.
Plunge, not falling or diving, and not a dress neckline revealing cleavage.*
But other dips, strikes, and plunges: geologic ones, specifically, the terms used for the analysis of geological structures.
Dip, strike, and plunge are geologic terms for the orientations of folded and faulted rocks. Dip: think opened book left page-side down on a coffee table while the reader gets a refill of coffee; the two sides slant away from the central spine; that’s dip. Strike: think compass direction of the book’s spine; that’s strike. Plunge: picture one end of that open book resting partly on a large coffee table book, inclining the spine; that’s plunge. Faulted and folded rocks have orientations that are similar, and the folded ones can even be pictured as an upside-down open book with those same three orientations.
Here’s the point: In a three-dimensional universe, we are accustomed to seeing the orientations of everything physical, even when we might not personally know a set of descriptors for those orientations. We see orientations, but most of us do not quantify by angles in horizontal or vertical planes. And that’s okay for everyday living. Just recognizing the way something is oriented is sufficient for safety: “Remember that the ramp is slippery when wet.”
If you live in a tree-shrouded humid area underlain by relatively undisturbed, flat-lying layers of sedimentary rocks or in an area of massive granitic batholiths, you won’t see many features to which you might apply dip, strike, and plunge. But in mountainous regions like the Himalayas, the Alps, the Rockies, the Andes, and the Appalachians, or on a tectonically squeezed island like Crete,** orientations of broken and folded rocks can be spectacular, and they reveal the history of shaping forces.
Anyway, this is about orientations. Wherever you find faulted and folded rocks, you might be amazed by the power required to do the faulting and folding. There are, of course, local compressive and tensional stresses, but the most spectacular of the folds are generally the product of movements by the large tectonic plates on which continents move. Slamming India into southern Asia has both raised the Tibetan Plateau and folded rocks in the Himalayas. So, when you think orientations, think of both local and overriding regional (or even worldwide) forces.
And the same applies to religious, social, philosophical, and political orientations. We are subject to forces on different scales, and we have all been bent and twisted by forces external to ourselves. Often, because of forces beyond our control, we tilt one way or another, warp this way or that, or incline toward or away from. We even separate and move relative to religious, social, philosophical, and political entities to which we have been long attached. But even if we ignore those religious, social, philosophical, and political tectonics that have shaped our lives on a grand scale, we still have to contend with the emotional tectonics that manifest themselves in our gut responses to circumstances. What forces shaped those emotional responses?
All of us can profit from applying the principles of structural geology to our lives. Structural geologists analyze the direction and strength of forces and their resultant effects on rocks. Compressive forces push rocks together; tensional forces pull them apart. Pushed together under great power, rocks can rise, fold, and sometimes fault (move). Pulled apart, rocks can fault and drop to form down-dropped basins.
How would we profit? We need to ask ourselves whether or not the forces that shaped our orientations were compressive or tensional. Both? Probably, we’ll all find that in our most recognizable and fundamental characteristics, we exhibit a history of those forces, just as the dipping and plunging rocks do along strikes. We are all that opened book. Our characteristics are those pages and covers that attach to a spine with a specific strike and plunge, sometimes with rips and creases.
Want to understand yourself a bit better? Do some structural analysis.
*Plunging necklines aside, cleavage is also revealed in the way a mineral or rock splits.
**See folded rocks at https://www.google.com/search?q=pics+of+geology+of+Crete&client=safari&rls=en&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=SuHmWXZ7Dg7VzM%253A%252Cswlme0bHef_rSM%252C_&usg=__ruq4B5HKT0qNBcauhp6p4gPZE4g%3D&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjn-9e7ufXXAhWCl-AKHa4WCQgQ9QEIKTAA#imgrc=SuHmWXZ7Dg7VzM:
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