Talk:Horst (geology)

Hydrocarbon exploration
My understanding is that most of the hydrocarbons found in rift basins occur in 'tilted fault blocks' rather than horsts. I'll try to find some sources that discuss this. Mikenorton (talk) 08:28, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

German word origin
I'm not really satisfied with the article text claiming "Horst means heap in German", because a heap is actually a "Haufen" (that translation works in 99% of the cases, e.g. dungheap = Misthaufen), it usually means an artifical collection of something that can't be stacked orderly.

If you take a look at the German Wikipedia article: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horst_%28Geologie%29 it explains that the naming of these geological formation is taken from miners' language where it was used for a fault in e.g. a coal bed. And it further states that it is related in its meaning to the topological term Horst, which is explained here: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horst_%28Toponym%29 Basically Horst means brushwood, scrub (similarly the large but crude, scrubby nest of an eagle(=Adler) is called Adlerhorst) and you have to think about something like this: http://www.nikon-fotografie.de/vbulletin/picture.php?albumid=16871&pictureid=248360 (this is in Africa, but was the best illustration I could find in a quick search) i.e. a dense group of brushes on a relatively small hill.

So this "elevated" thought is definitely elemental of "Horst", but also the natural cause. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the geologist who coined the term was investigating some of these brushy elevations and found out that they were caused by geological faults, and consequently reused the term for his new discovery. But certainly not all (topologic) Horsts are caused by faults, a lot are caused by patchy sedimentation/erosion, e.g. a solitary brush on a flat surface will catch sand and other particles from the air or water, and over time a small hill may grow. The word Horst made it into a number of placenames of settlements in swamp/marsh areas, of course because you could only build a farm or village on these elevated and thus dry areas. The English suffix "-hurst" is exactly the same word, e.g. Sandhurst, quote: "The name of the village is Anglo-Saxon and originates from the sandy soils and the hurst (a wooded eminence) of the area."

I know that this is way too much and too off-topic to put into this article here, but maybe someone is able to condense it to a precise explanation of the origin of the word, at least better than "heap".--79.194.234.190 (talk) 11:36, 10 October 2012 (UTC)