This 3D figure along with 40 more were created for Living with Earth: An Introduction to Environmental Geology by Travis Hudson and published by Prentice Hall.

These two figures give insight into the editorial process of educational illustration creation and how radically different the final figure can look from an original prototype. The bottom image is the prototype created more than a year prior to the top and final editorial approved image.

All of the elements in this figure from the shape of the terrain, the particles of the insets, and the varying zone saturation was specifically created for this figure to illustrate the features called out and discussed by the author.