question:  Why does the author focus on the water returning to smoothness after Ned's wreck?
context: A scream of brakes, the splash into icy waters, a long descent into alkaline depths ... His old car rattled and roared as he swung it recklessly around Pit Bend. Dazzled, and befuddled by his own rash speed, Ned Vince had only swift young reflexes to rely on to avoid a fearful, telescoping collision. His car hit the white-painted wooden rail sideways, crashed through, tumbled down a steep slope, struck a huge boulder, bounced up a little, and arced outward, falling as gracefully as a swan-diver toward the inky waters of the Pit, fifty feet beneath.... Ned Vince was still dimly conscious when that black, quiet pool geysered around him in a mighty splash. Movement was slower now, as he began to sink, trapped inside his wrecked car. The edges of that almost bottomless pool were caked with a rim of white—for the water, on which dead birds so often floated, was surcharged with alkali. The ripples that had ruffled the surface waters in the Pit, quieted again to glassy smoothness. The icy breeze tore tiny puffs of dust from grotesque, angling drifts of soil, nearly waterless for eons. Glacial ages, war, decadence, disease, and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumans to newer worlds in other solar systems, had done that. Loy Chuk had flown his geological expedition out from the far lowlands to the east, out from the city of Kar-Rah. He could think and dream and invent, and the civilization of his kind was already far beyond that of the ancient Twentieth Century. The dry mud that had encased it like an airtight coffin, had by now been chipped away by the tiny investigators; but soiled clothing still clung to it, after perhaps a million years. A mineral saturation that had held time and change in stasis. A strange accident, happening in a legendary antiquity, had aided them in their quest for knowledge. It might move, speak, remember its past! With infinite care it was crated in a metal case, and hauled into the flying machine.
output:  To demonstrate how time and progress move forward, without taking pause for the loss of a single or entire society
options:  To demonstrate how time and progress move forward, without taking pause for the loss of a single or entire society  To depict the difference between a 20th century moment and the future, when water has vanished from the continent  To illustrate the biological effects of alkali on the composition of the human body  To personify the all-consuming effects of nostalgia and fear in the last moments of a human's brief life