A talk on Loren Eiseley and Platte Basin Timelapse.

1. Extending the Senses:
Loren Eiseley's "The Flow of the River" and
the Platte Basin Timelapse Project
Tom Lynch
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
ASLE-UKI Conference
Cambridge, Sept. 2015
Photo © Mike Forsberg

2. Watershed Consciousness
"... the imagination is key to making watershed consciousness a potent force . . .”
--Lawrence Buell

3. Fractal Watersheds
"Watersheds can
be tricky to interpret
on a map, and - like
any good fractal -
they exist at
multiple scales.”
– Jonathan Wolfe,
Fractal Foundation
Self-similar river network from the Shaanxi province in China. Scale is 300 km across.
Colors represent elevation. Image Bruce D. Malamud, Kings College London.

6. Platte Basin Timelapse

7. Central Platte Timelapse
(click on arrows for both speaker icons to see timelapse and hear narration at the same time)

10. Many years ago, in the course
of some scientific
investigations in a remote
western county . . .

11. You have probably never experienced in yourself
the meandering roots of a whole watershed or felt
your outstretched fingers touching, by some kind
of clairvoyant extension, the brooks of snow-line
glaciers at the same time that you were flowing
toward the Gulf over the eroded debris of
worndown mountains.

17. Timelapse of Platte junction with
Missouri River