We have paused to take a panorama of the landscape: Mt Sharp, crater walls and local terrain before we descend into GlenElg. This could be one of the most dramatic landscape photographs of the mission. The nature of our enquiries has a heritage dating back to earlier scientific explorers like Charles Darwin in his voyages on HMS Beagle in the 1830s.
Origin of Species Chapter 10
‘We can best gain some idea of past time by knowing the agencies at work, and learning how deeply the surface of the land has been denuded, and how much sediment has been deposited. As Lyell has well remarked, the extent and thickness of our sedimentary formations are the result and the measure of the denudation which the earth’s crust has elsewhere undergone. Therefore a man should examine for himself the great piles of superimposed strata, and watch the rivulets bringing down mud, and the waves wearing away the sea-cliffs, in order to comprehend something about the duration of past time, the monuments of which we see all around us.’
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