| 释义 |
escarpment|ɪˈskɑːpmənt|
[ad. Fr. escarpement, f. escarper: see prec.]
The condition of being escarped; hence concr.
1. Ground cut into the form of an escarp for the purpose of fortification.
1802C. James Milit. Dict., Escarpment: see Declivity. 1847Disraeli Tancred vi. i, The living rock..formed the impregnable bulwarks and escarpments. 1860Russell Diary India 1858–9 I. 82 The old Porto Batavo walls still surround the town, with moat and escarpments. 1882Luck of Ladysmede I. 93 From which a natural escarpment swept down towards the river.
2. Geol. ‘The abrupt face or cliff of a ridge or hill range’ (Page). Also attrib.
1813Bakewell Introd. Geol. (1815) 70 It is only on the sides of the nearly perpendicular peaks and escarpments that the bare rock is visible. 1845Darwin Voy. Nat. viii. (1852) 165 The view is generally bounded by the escarpment of another plain. 1870Yeats Nat. Hist. Comm. 23 Plains of New Red Sandstone and Lias, succeeded by two great escarpments, the edges of table-lands. 1880Haughton Phys. Geog. v. 216 The western, or Libyan chain, is merely the escarpment edge of the plateau of the Sahara.
b. transf.
1853Kane Grinnell Exp. viii. (1856) 56 A naked escarpment of ice, twelve hundred feet high. 1856Whittier Panorama 2 [The] long escarpment of half-crumbled wall. |