"Apoc, Rebbecca, good to meet you. So rocks. As you may know, things fall down. It's not yet clear exactly why that is, but we'll take that as a given. Water flows, and wears things away. Plants grow and expand existing crevices, die and create dirt. Tall things become short things over time, and by studying erosion, we can calculate how long it might take for something like, say a mountain, to be worn down to nothing. If you go somewhere with interesting topology, you can see the detritus that rivers move on a constant basis at the deltas where they drain into lakes or the ocean."
"But all of that just says that things tend towards smoothness, towards entropy. We don't really know where or why our planet should have the shape that it does. Things tend to fall. How does something as massive as a mountain grow? Volcanoes give us a hint. But those kinds of mountains look very different from say, a mountain chain, and they tend to be made out of a different kind of rock. We also know that islands are basically just underwater mountains. This means that one can learn a lot about erosion of mountain peaks without actually having to climb a mountain by going island hopping. Caliba is tepid, relatively flat, and has fairly slow moving rivers. It was my hope that this would let me examine the fall of a mountain at multiple stages all in one place. What actually happened is that I had to dig around in stinking marshes for almost no benefit, and find out that the bedrock is mostly volcanic, and thus not useful for my area of research."
