hardpan
Pluralhardpans
- 1A distinct layer within the soil that water can scarcely penetrate.
Like a buried sheet of baked tile that rainwater simply pools on top of.
Heavy machinery had compacted the subsoil into a hardpan that trapped water near the surface.
Orchardists in the valley fracture the hardpan to let young roots reach deeper moisture.
Note
Built plainly from hard and pan, the word names a layer you cannot see but can certainly feel with a spade. Clay, silica, or iron and aluminum oxides cement it, so water pools above it and roots and tillage stop at it. It works as a count noun (a hardpan forms under the plow line) or a mass noun (digging through hardpan), and farmers speak of breaking or fracturing it.
- 2A dry lake: the flat, hardened bed left behind when a shallow lake evaporates.
Like a giant ceramic dish, baked flat and hard where standing water once sat.
Wind whipped dust across the hardpan where a seasonal lake had stood months earlier.
Land-speed records are set on the smooth hardpan of dry desert basins.
Similarplaya
Note
Here the word moves from under the ground to the ground itself: the exposed, sun-baked floor a vanished lake leaves behind, also called a playa or simply a dry lake. Where the buried soil layer is something to break through, this hardpan is a surface to cross. Fine sediment and evaporite minerals harden there once the water is gone, leaving a level, barren expanse.
Practice
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Origin
Formed by combining "hard" and "pan."