LDEO

Last Saturday, I went up to Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty
Earth Observatory for their annual Open House. I’ve passed the sign on 9W several times over the years, and really only noticed the “observatory” part of the sign; I thought it was an astronomical observatory, built before city and suburb light pollution pretty much ruined East Coast star-gazing. D’oh! But as it develops, LDEO actually observes this planet. Take a look at their site for the variety of very interesting things they do with the earth sciences.

One of them is dendrochronology. I spoke with a woman in that unit about the recent discovery of the wooden remains of an 18th C. ship at the WTC site. She told me that the clay the ship was found in was an almost perfect medium for preservation: they found actual leafs and other organic scraps, including some hair in the anaerobic muck. The hairs later revealed a louse. And boy, was the 18th C. lousy.

I’ve heard about the K/T boundary, but I never saw it before this core sample.
LDEO is located just north of the NJ/NY border. Nearby is the State Line Lookout atop the Palisades. This image is from the Lookout, looking northeast, across the mighty Hudson, and hundreds of millions of years of geological time. Hofstra Geology Professor Charles Merguerian gave a talk up here as turkey vultures and black vultures and red-tailed hawks drifted by on the thermals, practically at eye-level. Merguerian rocked my world: he argues that the Harbor Hill Moraine, where I live, is 50,000 years old, while the standard story is that the glacier that created it retreated by 10,000 years ago. The 10,000 year date he attributes to a valley glacier that carved out the Hudson ford. Merguerian’s webpage promises to keep my busy.