Geology
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Sullivan Street
South of Washington Square Park in Manhattan, a newish building sports these delightful fossils in its sidewalk-level facade. Smile at the security cameras, or salute them with a single digit, and enjoy! *** Trump’s klownish klepto-kakistocracy tackles COVID-19: fundamentalist bigot/anti-science idiot Mike Pence, who as Governor of Indiana caused an epidemic by his ignorance and…
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Fossils
A collection of fossils from Missouri, from back when the region was a shallow sea. Long before our time, my friends. These were a gift from a friend who recommended they be boiled a long, long time before they’re ready. I can’t get over the ones that look like liberty or Phrygian caps. You might…
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Oh, Schist!
The eastern edge of Twin Island, facing Long Island Sound just north of Orchard Beach in the Bronx, is an outcropping of the Hartland Formation schist.And does it ever outcrop!Quoting the geological argot of the USGS “The rock consists of granitic and garnetiferous amphibolite gneiss with numerous quartz veins and migmatite dikes. Migmatite is an…
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Gorges
“Ithaca is Gorges” is awfully good branding. I thought the gorges that sliced away through shales and sandstones at the northern and southern edges of Cornell were gorgeous.Fall Creek in the rain during the morning. Most of this one is seen from above, on the Cayuga Trail. Only disconcerting thing: all the anti-suicide netting on…
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Flinty
The National Museum of Copenhagen is filled with flint tools from the pre-metal millennia. This stuff makes for very sharp edges. The stone of Europe’s Stone Age, flint stones were also used to start fires and spark guns into the 19th century. The Baltic beaches were littered with nodules of this dark chert. It’s a…
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Chesapecten
These are fossilized shells of extinct scallops found on the Piankatank River in Virginia. They’re in the genus Chesapecten, all of whose members no longer live upon this earth. Such mineralized remains are dated from the early Miocene period to the early Pleistocene. Here’s more detail about the rich fossil world of the Chesapeake. *…
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Oregonia
There’s your beautiful world, NW edition. Here’s Masha Gessen, an old hand at autocracy, on surviving Trumpism, very necessary reading now.
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Traces of the Ice Age
Don’t you just love these? These grooves are found along the path in the forest of the NYBG, and time and generations of feet have worn them down slightly. They’re glacial striations, gouged out by the rubble on the bottom the ice as it scraped across the hard surface rock. These can be found in…
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Pothole
Seemingly drilled into the schist of Inwood Hill by some kind of large-bore drill, this is actually a glacial pothole, scoured out by the mighty power of swirling water and abrasive stones during the heady days of the Wisconsin glaciation. The diameter is a little over a foot and a half. The heights of Inwood,…
Backyard and Beyond 