June 2023

The Depths (?) of a sea,

The Catskill geologists,

The Mountain Eagle, Dec. 1, 2017

Robert and Johanna Titus

Have you ever been to Manor Kill Falls? You take Rte. 30 to where it intersects Rte. 990-V and then you head north a few miles and then watch for the signs. They have a fine parking lot and then you have a choice of trails. The upper trail heads for the top of the falls, but we want you to take the lower trail. That one takes you down to the bottom of the falls where you get a fine scenic look at it. That’s where the best geology is too.

You stand at a good location and look up at the falls. If you have an eye for rock types then you will recognize a sequence composed mostly of thinly bedded black shales. These strata are interrupted with the occasional dark sandstone. That’s a good start but now you need to get a better look at these rocks. You can do that by looking down; the ground is littered with rocks. A thin “shingle” of black shale will reveal a very fine-grained sedimentary rock; it is composed of silt and clay. None of those grains are large enough to be seen. It is black from all the organic matter in it – the stuff of ancient life.

It is natural for a geologist to begin looking for fossils. Those provide the clues for figuring out exactly what kind of environment is represented here. The hunting was disappointing at first but, after a short while, the fossils of some shellfish were turned up. These were creatures called brachiopods. Like clams, they have two shells, and like clams, they spent all of their lives lying on the seafloor. But they are not clams; they have a very different anatomy, so different that they are not even distant cousins of clams.

Nevertheless, these brachiopods are marine animals, and they tell us that all the strata we are looking at were formed, about 390 million years ago, at the bottom of something that is often called the Catskill Sea. Stand back at look up again. Each horizon of stratified rock once took its turn being the floor of that ocean.

Well, now we know something important; The Manor Kill Falls location was once the bottom of a large ocean. The next question that comes to mind, to a geologist anyway, is “just how deep was this ocean?’ We can’t throw a plumb bob overboard so just how do we determine this important bit of information. The answer is that we don’t, we can’t. But we can make some approximations.

Here’s how we do that? We have already looked those lithologies over and we have found that most of the bedrock here is fine grained black shale. That’s a type of rock that forms in relatively deep waters. The black color speaks to us of a relative scarceness of oxygen on that sea floor. That black biologic material would have decayed away if there had been oxygen. We did not find many fossils so not too many shellfish lived down there.

We thought we were building a case for a very deep-sea environment, but then we found something else. That something else was downstream. There we saw a slab of rock covered with what are called ripple marks. Take a look at our photo. These are slightly asymmetrical ripples and that indicates that these were sculpted by currents passing across that sea floor. What does that mean? Ripples are rare in very deep waters. It means that this seafloor was not all that deep.

We stood on that slab; we were literally standing on the bottom of an ancient sea. We looked up and, in our mind’s eyes, we could see the dimness of just a little sunlight that had reached down to this seafloor. It just wasn’t that deep.

Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.” Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.com.”

An image of the past – the Schoharie Creek Valley

The Catskills Geologists. Mountain Eagle, 2017

Robert and Johanna Titus.

We love to drive around in the Catskills. There is always so much scenery to see.
Even at 55 miles per hour you can look and see so much, at least the passenger half of our marriage can. But sometimes – no frequently – we feel the need to stop and get out so that we can stand along the side of the road and just gaze – into the past. Let’s do that in this week’s column.

Our journey will take us to the Schoharie Valley, midway between Middleburgh and Schoharie itself. There we find a special sort of imagery. Take a look at our photo. We are looking east from Rte. 30. In the distance is a hill with the unlikely name of “Rundy Cup Mountain.” In the middle foreground is the valley floor of Schoharie Creek. It’s pretty, don’t you think? That valley floor is remarkably flat and that is important, but first let’s concern ourselves with Rundy Mountain. We want you to look again and notice something you might have missed the first time.

There are sharp boundaries between agricultural fields and forests on the slopes of
Rundy Cup Mountain. And those sharp boundaries define a nice curvature to the lower slopes of the mountain. There is not a trained geologist in the whole world who would not immediately see what we saw. We looked, and then turned around and looked west; we saw the same curvature on that side of the valley. That curvature defines what we call a U-shaped valley.

And that is the dead giveaway to the valley’s long ago history. A U-shaped valley, like this one, is always the product of a valley glacier. We looked again and, in our mind’s eyes, we gazed into the past and saw the Schoharie Creek Valley filled, almost to the top, with a glacier. Our mind’s eyes rose up into the sky and we looked down on it. We had returned to an episode of time, late in the Ice Age. We looked south, and we saw that glacier, confined by the valley walls, and moving like a river of ice, south through the valley. The white surface of the ice was fractured by great, dark, curved crevasses. These curvatures betrayed a southward motion to the ice.

We, the mind’s eyes, paused a full thousand feet above the ice. It was a warm day, by ice age standards. Meltwater, in abundance, had accumulated beneath the ice, and it was lubricating that southward motion. We hung in the air and listened; we heard creaks, and groans emanating from the moving ice below us. From time to time, great, explosive, cracking, echoing sounds followed. On this day the brittle ice was advancing at the almost unheard of pace of 100 feet per day!

It had been a clear ice age mid-June morning, but now it was late afternoon. The sun shined down directly on the ice and a thick ground fog had formed. The fog rose up and enveloped us; we could no longer see the glacier.

When the fog finally cleared, it was very late in the day, but it was a very different day. We, the mind’s eyes, had traveled centuries forward through time – the mind’s eyes can do that. We had arrived at a time, long after that valley glacier had melted away. Now, the entire bottom of the Schoharie Creek was filled with a sizable meltwater lake. Its waters stretched out as far as we could see to the north and to the south. Beneath those waters, sediments of silt and clay were accumulating.

Now we were able to put together the whole story of this part of the valley. Those curved valley slopes had been sculpted by the passing ice; the flat valley floor was younger; it dated back to the level bottom of that post glacial lake.

Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.com. Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.” Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.”

A Journey through time in Kaaterskill Clove

The Catskill Geologists; Nov. 2017

Robert and Johanna Titus

Have you ever hiked the north rim trail at Kaaterskill Clove? It’s one of those many great experiences that anyone living in the Catskills should have done – perhaps, like us, many times. Better still, it’s something you should take visitors to see. When we go there, we stop at Sunset Rock and look down about a thousand feet or so, and gaze into the distant past. Way down there, about 15,000 years ago, was a raging, foaming, pounding, thundering, whitewater torrent. Those were the waters of the melting glaciers of those late ice age times. That flow did most of the work of carving Kaaterskill Clove. That’s what makes this truly a geological wonder.

But there is still an older time, represented down there. Down in the very depths of the canyon, there are stratified sandstones and shales. The canyon is about a thousand feet deep here, so there must be an equal amount of stratified rock. Those rocks are middle and late Devonian age, which makes them about 385 to 375 million years old – that’s in very round numbers. It’s natural for geologists to ponder such vast numbers. We are pros; we are professional scientists, and we are not supposed to wax poetic about such things, but – we just can’t help it.

The two of us began to wonder just how many years had passed by from when the oldest strata, at the bottom of the Clove were deposited, to when those at Sunset Rock came to be. We got out some publications from the New York State Museum and began to make some “guesstimates.” We are only going to make some gross approximations today; so don’t hold us to any of our numbers. We just want to give you a notion of when all the stratigraphy at Kaaterskill Clove came into being, and how long it took to be deposited. If somebody thinks they can come up with better numbers, we welcome them.

We think the strata at the bottom of the canyon belong to a unit of rock called the Plattekill Formation. The Plattekill is a unit of gray and brown sandstone. The New York State Museum places the middle Plattekill at about 385 million years in age. We think the top of Kaaterskill Clove corresponds with the top of the Oneonta Formation, a largely red sandstone, and that makes it about 381 million years in age. The math is pretty easy; we get about 4 million years of time represented from the bottom to the top of the clove’s stratigraphy. Remember those 1,000 feet that the canyon encompasses? Well, we divide through and we get about 4,000 years per foot of stratified rock.

Now, none of this is great science, and none of it is great math. A foot of river sandstone might have been deposited in a few hours. A foot of red shale may have taken many, many thousands of years to form. There must have been sediments from vast expanses of time that were eroded away and lost forever. Other great lengths of time just never saw any deposition at all. But, we think we have come up with some reasonable approximations and that is all we are aiming at.

Again, stand atop Sunset Rock and look down those thousand feet. See 4,000 years of time for every foot below you.

Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskill                Geologist.” Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.com.”

Our reader’s rocks: the origins of flint.

The Catskill Geologists

Robert and Johanna Titus

Dear Bob and Johanna: My husband and I were out exploring north of Rte. 145 (near intersection of County Rtes. 443 and 156) in Berne when we found an interesting outcrop. One of the rock strata had peculiar black masses within it. I am sending a photo. Can you tell me what this is? Debra Teator, Freehold.

Thank you Mrs. Teator. You did the right thing sending us a photo. They can be very helpful. We can’t always identify geologic features from a photo, but this time we can. The gray rock surrounding those black masses belongs to something called the Helderberg Limestone. We expect to be writing a lot about the Helderberg as it is a very important local unit of rock. Its most important aspect is that it takes us back about 400 million years to a time when almost all of our region lay beneath the waters of a shallow tropical sea. If we could transport you to that Helderberg Sea, you would look around and swear that you were in the Bahamas.

The Helderberg Limestone is very well exposed at John Boyd Thacher Park, and we did not know of your outcrop in Berne. The Helderberg is composed of several subunits called formations, and this one is the Kalkberg Formation. Its sediments were deposited well offshore, in waters that were certainly not deep but might be best described as subtidal. If you were at the bottom of the Kalkberg Sea during the daytime, then you could look up and probably see a lot of sunlight.

Now, what is chert and how did it form? Chert is described as being microcrystalline quartz. That makes one of nature’s most common types of minerals: quartz. But, unlike normal quartz, its crystals are extremely small. That’s the easy part; what is harder is figuring out exactly how it formed. Late at night, in geology bars, this has always been the subject of debate. We will tell you our best understanding.

The first thing that happened is that the sediment that makes limestone was deposited. This stuff consisted of very small grains of calcium carbonate (CaCO₃). Most of those grains had previously been parts of the shells of shellfish. Clams, snails and other shell-bearing organisms had died and their skeletons had broken up into grains of sand, silt and clay.

After this sediment had been deposited but before it hardened into rock, it was affected by chemical processes. If we understand it properly, water rich in dissolved silica (SiO₂), was being squeezed out of the soft, wet sediments. When the dissolved silica reached layers of sediment that had a low pH, which is also known as a high acidity, then the microcrystalline quartz crystalized as chert. The chert formed into globs which are commonly called chert nodules. If the nodules grew large enough and were abundant, then they would grow into each other and form strata of chert. That is what is seen in the photo.

So, today’s journey into the past has taken us into 400 million year old sediments and allowed us to watch the formation of chert. This material is better known to most people as flint. That’s the stuff that Stone Age cultures learned to fashion into stone tools, such as arrowheads. It also functioned in flintlock rifles.

Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page at “The Catskill Geologist.” Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.com.”

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An ancient river channel

The Catskill Geologists

The Mountain Eagle Oct. 20, 2017

Robert and Johanna Titus

Every so often, in our columns, we refer to a sizable ledge of sandstone as being the cross section of a Devonian age stream channel. The Devonian part is easy; all of the bedrock in the Catskills is Devonian in age (419 to 359 million years ago). But what about the stream channel part? How, exactly, is it that we know that?

It’s a fair question and we think we should take a crack at answering it. Let’s do that this week. Recently we were over at North Lake, on the Catskill Front. Our primary interests on that day was the ice age history of the land that lies between North and South Lakes. But, we came across a massive ledge of light colored sandstone and it caught our eyes. We took a good look and a good photo. We had seen some interesting structures within the sandstone.

Well, what we had seen were a number of erosion surfaces. We printed up our picture and then inked in those erosions. Take a look at our photo. This had been a sizable river. Its sandstones must be twelve feet or so in thickness. You need a river pretty much that deep just to accumulate all that sand.

This river lay at the bottom of the steep slopes of a mountain range. These were called the Acadian Mountains and they towered above what is now western New England. Streams, that descended their slopes, would have flowed out onto what we call the Catskill Delta. They carried a lot of sediment, most of it sand. These sands came to be deposited where North Lake is today.

These were likely large and powerful streams. They would have been occasionally subject to great flooding events. It is only logical to think that, from time to time, it rained a lot up in the Acadians. Those storms generated powerful flows of water, carrying large amounts of sand. When the streams flowed far enough out onto the delta then their flows slowed down and the sand came to be deposited.

If all that is true, then we should see the evidence in outcroppings, such as the one in our photo. We think that the evidence is there – in the inked lines. Each flood event must have reached a peak, when the flows were at their maximum levels. Those flows, it only seems logical, would have eroded into the sediments of the stream channel. When we inked in those erosional surfaces, we thought we had identified such events. The bottoms of these surfaces are concave and they, each one of them, look like features that had been eroded.

There are at least four of these erosional surfaces in our outcrop, or about one every three feet. We think that each of these surfaces records the peak of a major flood event. During that peak, the flood currents would have picked up large amounts of sand and swept it away. As the flood passed its peak, currents slowed down and most of that sand would have come to rest as a new deposit. Most of the sand in between these erosion surfaces seems to have been deposited at the end of its flood or during quiet times that followed.

How often did these floods occur? We can come up with a very approximate estimate. There are about 4,000 feet of sedimentary rock found in this Devonian sequence and it took about 11 million years to deposit them. That averages out to about 2,700 years per foot of sedimentary rock. If there were three feet per flood and if all the above is true, that means that these floods occurred every 75,000 years or so! That’s a lot of time.

But, most importantly, all this is consistent with the notion that such sandstone ledges were once stream channels.

Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.” Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.com”