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Lobate Scarps: Words in the News This Week
in which the sorrowful author, your humble deponent, William of Casselman, must, yet again, totally disagree with the Oxford English Dictionary – O lamentable pass!
Why is the moon sad? Poor blue moon! Our moon is shrinking.
Yes, our Luna, beloved of lovers, is on the dimensional wane! It waxeth no longer in moony girth. The heavenly satellite of earth now ebbs in circumference. The night’s own orb is but a dwindling sphere, the very moon under whose ghost-pale beams sportive humans have scampered through millennia of sublunary frolic.
To offer evidence of this moon swoon, the much pocked face of the lunar surface displays lengthy lobate scarps, multikilometer-long moon wrinkles. Some scarps are much shorter.
Lobate Scarps?
Lobate scarps are thrust-up fault lines that appear as long curved cliffs. Like our earth, the moon began as a fireball and is still cooling, still shrinking. The surface marks of its shrinkage are escarpments or scarps, shown below on the lunar photo.
Stated no less an authority than Thomas Watters of the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the National Air and Space Museum of the United States and lead author of a recent paper revealing the details, “Relatively young, globally distributed thrust faults show recent contraction of the whole moon, likely due to cooling of the lunar interior. The amount of contraction is estimated to be about 100 meters in the recent past.”
The news staff at www.Science20.com explained, “As the moon contracted, the mantle and surface crust were forced to respond, forming thrust faults where a section of the crust cracks and juts out over another. Many of the resulting cliffs, or scarps, have a semi-circular or lobe-shaped appearance, giving rise to the term ‘lobate scarps.’ Scientists aren’t sure why they look this way; perhaps it’s the way the lunar soil (regolith) expresses thrust faults, according to Watters.” Bill Casselman adds: hardly a deep thought! That’s like saying the sun is hot because that’s the way it is.
Regolith
This somewhat obscure but delightful astronomical term refers to rock debris, meteorite dust and sundry interstellar flotsam that has collected on the surface of the moon and may be said loosely to constitute lunar soil. The Greek roots of the word are ῥῆγος (regos) ‘rug, blanket’ and λίθος (lithos) ‘stone, pebble.’ An apt word indeed, the regolith is the rug of rock upon the floor of the moon. Lithos is a very productive root in modern English scientific coinages like lithograph, lithotomy (‘cutting for the stone,’ that is, surgical removal of a renal calculus or kidney stone), cryolite, monolith, and Neolithic ‘of the New Stone Age.’
Lobate
The basic meaning is patent. Lobate means ‘having lobes’ or ‘lobe-shaped.’ In reference to cliffs and fissures and clefts of a planet’s crust, lobate means lobe-shaped or quasi-circular.
Scarp
Scarp is the interesting word in this newsy phrase. The prestigious Oxford English Dictionary opines that the word scarp is of obscure origin.
No, it is not the least bit obscure.
Most non-Oxford etymologists think its origins are as clear as a nightful of moonlight.
A scarp is land or rock cut away steeply, sticking out or up sharply, pointedly. Scarp is an aphetic form of an earlier word escarp, familiar to many in the word escarpment. If you cut a sound off the start of a word, the correct linguistic name for the process is aphesis, an example being squire, an aphetic form of esquire.
A basic metaphor buried in the oldest relative of the word scarp gives rise to these Indo-European words:
Gothic (an Old Germanic language) skarpô ‘ending in a point’
German scharf ‘pointed, sharp’
The Germanic root was very early borrowed into the Romance languages, appearing in Italian as scarpa ‘shoe’ that is, leather footwear with a pointed toe. Consider the Provençal verb escarpi ‘to rip into pointed pieces, to stick out pointedly.’
Even the English word sharp is cognate with German scharf, featuring the common change of terminal High Germanic /f/ to Low Germanic /p/ visible in other words like Dutch dorp, Frisian terp and Old Scandinavian(Viking)/English thorp, all meaning ‘very small village’ compared to German Dorf ‘village, hamlet.’ Consider also Swedish torp ‘cottage, little farm.’ It may be derived from a Proto-Indo-European root whose Latin reflex is turba ‘group of people, crowd, noisy tumult,’ with derived adjective turbulentus and its Greek cognate turbe ‘crowd.’
After the Scandinavian invasions of northern Britain that began late in the eighth century CE, this Viking word thorp for ‘secondary little hamlet’ gave rise to hundreds of English town names, little places like Althorp, where Princess Diana was buried. Add examples like Cowthorpe, East Herringthorpe, Nunsthorpe, Owlthorpe and Theddlethorpe All Saints.
In Gothic and Old High German the root skarp undergoes metathesis, with the transposing of the /r/ and the /a/ to give a Gothic form like skrapa ‘structural support, underlying rock’ and an older German form like Schroff ‘sheer rock’ or ‘precipice,’ eventually leaving the form solely in modern German as an adjective schroff ‘sheer,’ while Abgrund became the common modern German noun for precipice.
In sixteenth-century Italian scarpa named also the talus of a rampart, that is, the slope of an earthwork, which gradually increases in thickness as it descends, just as in geology the talus is the sloping pile of rock debris that lies at the base of a cliff made up of rocky material that has fallen from the face of the cliff.
Therefore, is the Oxford English Dictionary correct in positing an unknown origin of the word scarp? Not on your life!
I happen to have been born in southern Ontario, Canada, a few miles away from the Niagara Escarpment, a well-known structure formed in the bedrock of the Great Lakes, a long eroded cliff, a sheer-faced ridge that extends hundreds of kilometers through Ontario, Michigan and ends in Illinois near Chicago. One may saunter on and beside the Niagara Escarpment while hiking Ontario’s beautiful Bruce Trail. If you are visiting, check the Bruce out online.
