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Chapter One Invitations to Study the Earth’s Past Scenery, indescribably grand. Water on the Mohawk looked “dark and troubled.” Huge rocks on either side of the road [leaving Little Falls], in various places, could perceive big holes evidently worn by the friction of water. Look at Mitchell [sic] again. He will tell you, how big the Mohawk once was; where, when and how an immense lake, which covered all the country, now known as the German Flats, “Thaw’d and resolv’d itself into a dew.” When the Hudson broke through its rockbounded barrier in “the Highlands,” and formed its present course to the Ocean. —A Knickerbocker tour of New York State, 1822 An Overview of New York Geography New York’s physical geography attests to the marvelous history of the planet. Along its eastern boundary can be seen the grandeur of an impossibly ancient tectonic-plate collision, which upthrust the now bucolic Taconic Mountains so violently that they once stood as tall as today’s Himalayas. On the other side of the state, the power of so mundane a force as ordinary fluvial erosion is displayed in the mighty flow of the Niagara River as it drops down a small step to thunderous effect. Everywhere in between lies evidence of many other historical geological processes. Broad tracts containing fossil-bearing sedimentary rocks attest to extensive durations of marine incursions upon land now far from the oceans. An otherwise completely confusing jumble of soils, sand, and rocks of all sizes and types date from more recent periods of extreme climate change, in which the advances, retreats, and melting of continent-covering sheets of ice not only shuffled surface materials but also created many of the state’s most prominent lakes and valleys. Much of what is now known about the Earth’s history has been discovered and refined only within the past 170 years. In 1800, the modern ideas about cli- 18 Exploring New York State mate dynamics or structures of the Earth’s interior that now provide fundamental bases for widely accepted accounts of our planet’s geological history had not yet been developed. At that time, nobody would have imagined trying to analyze the dynamics of continental glaciation. Nevertheless, early nineteenth-century American geologists were fascinated by basic problems of decoding surface clues that might indicate anything about the hidden structures beneath to help identify the whereabouts of potentially valuable minerals. They felt compelled to explore remote terrains and to weave imaginative rationales from their meager harvests of hard-won data. Later generations have tended to denigrate the quality of those first provisional explanations, which were really impressively resourceful when one considers that early scientists virtually had to invent the tools of investigation simultaneously with the theories that could guide their exploration. The range of early American scientific interest in nature extended boundlessly across the kingdoms of animal, plant, and mineral, but the natural historian was constrained by two factors. First, the geological record lay mostly hidden from view and was therefore inaccessible to all but the most adventurous and energetic travelers . Second, a miserly handful of speculative theoretical frameworks were all that European thinkers had developed and promoted during the preceding century, and these were prejudiced in important ways by a dogmatic Judeo-Christian scriptural tradition. Even so, the American geologist had a few things in his favor: persistence, a willingness to blaze new trails, a new land not yet known to science, audacity, and a healthy disregard for European authority. These advantages combined especially well for those who studied natural history in New York. Early observers of New York’s topography reported their encounters with a wildly diverse variety of landforms and natural features. The northern part of the state contained the most rugged mountain province in the northeastern United States, the Adirondack Mountain dome. A ring of lowland areas circumscribed this persistently impenetrable wilderness, however, with natural navigable waterways roughly delineating all four sides of the bounding quadrilateral: Lake Champlain to the east, the Mohawk River valley to the south, Lake Ontario to the west, and the Saint Lawrence River valley to the north. Most of the rest of the state consisted of a gently rolling topography of hills, valleys, and waterways. The curiously eroded Allegheny plateau dominated the western and central regions, with the intermittently interrupting ridges of the Catskill and Helderberg Mountains forming an eastern frontier. The north-south Hudson River valley cut its dramatic gorge through the Hudson Highlands toward the...

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