How do entire cities or civilizations end up physically buried underground with modern people living obliviously above or nearby?
In: Earth Science
There is many ways things can end up buried. The very simplest is that for most of human history there was no trash trucks taking things away so people just buried stuff a lot. Even building a new house the easiest thing to do with the old house was knock it over and push it in a hole.
For natural processes there is lots of them. The best are very sudden, like a land slide or a giant flood that carries mud. Or even a volcano like in pompeii. But even without that think about what would happen if you made a big pile of dirt in your yard. Eventually the rain might make it go away. But it doesn’t really go away, all that dirt just washes down hill, and if you are the guy at the bottom of the hill, if you don’t sometimes clear all the dirt it’ll eventually build up. very very slow, but eventually. Same with places that rocks break down into dust, that dust blows somewhere, and eventually would cover up the place it blows to. Most types of erosion wear stuff away one place then it piles up somewhere else.
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