Mesa

Mesa (Portuguese and Spanish for table) is the American English term for tableland, an elevated area of land with a flat top and sides that are usually steep cliffs. It takes its name from its characteristic table-top shape. It may also be called a table hill, table-topped hill or table mountain. It is larger than a butte, which it otherwise resembles closely.

It is a characteristic landform of arid environments, particularly the Western and Southwestern United States in badlands and mountainous regions ranging from Washington and California to the Dakotas and Texas. Examples are also found in many other nations including Spain, Sardinia, North and South Africa, Arabia, India, and Australia.

Grand Mesa is a large mesa located in western Colorado in the Southwest United States. Cerro Negro is a mesa in Argentina.

The term mesa is used throughout the United States to describe a flat-topped mountain or hill.

Formation

Mesas form by weathering and erosion of horizontally layered rocks that have been uplifted by tectonic activity. Variations in the ability of different types of rock to resist weathering and erosion cause the weaker types of rocks to be eroded away, leaving the more resistant types of rocks topographically higher than their surroundings. This process is called differential erosion. The most resistant rock types include sandstone, conglomerate, quartzite, basalt, chert, limestone, lava flows and sills. Lava flows and sills, in particular, are very resistant to weathering and erosion, and often form the flat top, or caprock, of a mesa. The less resistant rock layers are mainly made up of shale, a softer rock that weathers and erodes more easily.

Mesa (computer graphics)

Mesa is a collection of free and open-source libraries that implement several rendering as well as video acceleration APIs related to hardware-accelerated 3D rendering, 3D computer graphics and GPGPU, the most prominent being OpenGL. Mesa is hosted at freedesktop.org and used on Linux, BSD and other operating systems. Additionally to the APIs, Mesa also harbors most of the available free and open-source graphics device drivers, which is a bit misleading, since the actual device drivers are located in the kernel, and the user-space part consists of some compiler software. The development of Mesa started in August 1993 by Brian Paul, who is still active in the project today, by now containing numerous contributions from various other people and companies worldwide, due to its broad adoption. Crowdfunding has been successfully used to partially drive development of Mesa.

Overview

Implementations of rendering APIs

Mesa is known as housing implementation of graphic APIs. Historically the main API that Mesa has implemented is OpenGL, along with other Khronos Group related specifications (like OpenVG, OpenGL ES or recently EGL). But Mesa can implement other APIs and indeed it did with Glide.

Mesa (disambiguation)

A mesa is an elevated area of land with a flat top, surrounded on all sides by steep cliffs.

Mesa may also refer to:

Places

Software

Other uses