What is "silt"

Usage examples of "silt".

Lateral resemblances with other languages - similar sounds applied to analogous significations - were noted and listed only in order to confirm the vertical relation of each to these deeply buried, silted over, almost mute values.

Beside the Thames the stink of the silt mixed with the sweeter exhalations of the molasses, sugar and rum in the jumble of decrepit storehouses and manufactories that pressed up from the quays, together with the acrid tangs of the sea-wrack and snails exposed by the ebbing tide.

The greasy-looking, turgid flow, heavy with silt, was one of hundreds of channels cutting through the swampy delta, and the walls of a Stilty city rose beyond it.

There be passed a quiet afternoon, nursing a light fever in his bunk, thinking of Hardman and his strange southward odyssey, and of the silt banks glowing like luminous gold in the meridian sun, both forbidding and inviting, like the lost but forever beckoning and unattainable shores of the amnionic paradise.

During this period numerous caves were located and excavated, Pleistocene-age river terraces and sand dunes were surveyed and tested for archeological remains, fossil shorelines of lakes were examined, and thick deposits of windblown silt, or loess, deposited during the Pleistocene were searched for evidence of former human activity.

Before the drawdown the stream had been swallowed by the expanse of Breedlove Lake, existing only as a current within the reservoir, but now it had been freed to course through its own eroded canyon, through seasons of silt, as it cut its way to the muddy waters of the great Watauga, pulsing again through the heart of the valley.

Iakhovas stood his ground, finning down a couple feet to stand in the silt.

The sand is continually silting, and a khamseen may alter the whole surface of the land, yet to the eye it remains substantially the same.

But before reaching the end of her course, the fine gritty soil settled out into an immense fan-shaped deposit, a mud-clogged wilderness of low islands and banks surrounded by shallow lakes and winding streams, as though the Great Mother of rivers was so exhausted from her long journey that she dropped her heavy load of silt just short of her destination, then staggered slowly to the sea.

There was the new quay which ran across the mudflats and stands of zebra grass of the old, silted harbor to the retreating edge of the Great River, where the fisherfolk of the floating islands gathered in their little coracles to sell strings of oysters and mussels, spongy parcels of red river moss, bundles of riverweed stipes, and shrimp and crabs and fresh fish.

Colorado raged gloriously below the cliffsides, leaping and frothing in great silted billows and surges, flinging rocks and driftwood with tigerlike abandon.

In the spring, one of our guides assured us with unwonted cheer, it would overflow its banks, depositing nourishing silt on the flood-plains, hailed by the Akkadians as a life-giver.

Here, where the river was enormously wide and stained the sea dark for hundreds of miles with the silt it had swept from the heart of the continent, stood a city of eleven million people, rigidly laid out according to a complex and unyielding master design, spread out along with precise arcs intersected by the spokes of grand boulevards that radiated from the waterfront.

They foregathered in silence in the safe, hollowed heart of the bowl, where nothing could fall any farther, and ranged the scattered fringes of a desert of tumbled stones, through a pall of acrid dust that still silted down thickly on every blade of grass between the rocks, until there was no green left.

What I took for river silt was small black mud snails, giving off a faint dull glinty light.