The Hudson Valley in the Ice Age: A Geological History & Tour

by Robert Titus

Overview

With the Hudson Valley in the Ice Age: A Geological History & Tour, join Professors Robert and Johanna Titus on a tour of the Hudson River Valley and see this familiar region with new eyes—the eyes of geologists who see a half-mile-thick sheet of ice grinding its way down the valley and overtopping even the highest mountains. With the Tituses as your guides, “see” an ancient Manhattan high and dry with the Atlantic shoreline 100 miles to the southeast, North/South Lake State Park as a giant and frigid “waterslide park,” and the immense expanse of Glacial Lake Albany stretching the entire length of the Hudson Valley with its deltas that would become the sites of some of America's most famous estates. Finally, witness the cataclysmic flood that cascaded through the valley at the end of the Ice Age as a great ice dam broke and a gigantic wall of water swept down the valley.

Writing primarily for a general audience, the Tituses take the reader through the Catskills, the Shawangunks, the Taconics, along the banks of the Hudson River, to Bash Bish Falls and Lake Taghkanic—to all those unique and beautiful places that make the Hudson Valley “the landscape that defined America”—and demonstrate that all this beauty we see every day rose phoenix-like from the devastation caused by the slow, inexorable advance of a grinding, half-mile-thick bulldozer of ice and the raging flood that followed its retreat.

The result of these devastating events is the landscape that inspired the Hudson River School painters and America's pioneer landscape architects—gifts of the Ice Age, and the familiar landscape we enjoy today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781883789725
Publisher:	Black Dome Press, Corporation
Publication date:	10/02/2012
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 2.20(d)

About the Author

Robert Titus, PhD, is a paleontologist by training who has done considerable professional research on the fossils of upstate New York. He teaches in the Geology Department at Hartwick College. His previous books—The Catskills: A Geological Guide (3rd edition, 2004), The Catskills in the Ice Age (revised edition, 2003), The Other Side of Time: Essays by “The Catskill Geologist” (2007)—were published by Purple Mountain Press. Johanna Titus, MS, has a degree in molecular biology. She teaches in the Allied Health and Biological Sciences Department at SUNY Dutchess. Robert and Johanna write regular columns for Kaatskill Life magazine, the Register Star newspaper chain and the Woodstock Times.

Table of Contents

Preface viii

Acknowledgments xii

1 A Journey of the Mind's Eye 1

2 The Decline and Fall of a Warm Earth 7

3 South by Southwest 19

4 The Wall of Manitou 29

5 The Great Moraine 35

6 The Hudson Canyon 41

7 The First Retreat 47

8 Later Retreats 51

9 The Drowned Lands 57

10 Lake Albany 61

11 The Great Deltas 67

12 April 3rd, 16,190 BP 75

13 The Glaciers of Plattekill Clove 83

14 Ice Age Water Park 89

15 The Red Chasm 99

16 The Bottom of a Lake 109

17 Land of Lakes 115

18 Bash Bish Falls 121

19 The Northern Drowned Lands 125

20 The Wetlands 129

21 Niagara in Philmont 133

22 Drumlins 137

23 March of the Glaciers 141

24 Ice Age Architecture 145

25 Valley of the Kings 149

26 The Post-Glacial Fractures 155

27 Silent Earthquakes on the Hudson 159

28 Yellow Alert? 163

29 The Slides of Hyde Park 167

30 Elephant's Graveyard 173

31 Ice Age Ghosts 179

32 Extinction 183

33 The Dunes of Pine Bush 187

34 Bad Day on Wall Street 193

35 Never Again? 197

Bibliographic Essay 199

About the Authors 205

Index 206

What People are Saying About This

Chet Raymo

If you live in or near the Hudson Valley, this delightful book will help you imagine what is no longer there to be seen—an Ice Age glacier reaching from northern Canada to what is now the mouth of New York Harbor, that in its advance and retreat shaped the landscape we enjoy today. Robert Titus and Johanna Titus have poked their geological noses into every clove and hollow, every rill and fen, and seen everywhere the signature of ice.
— Chet Raymo (coauthor of Written in Stone: A Geological History of the Northeastern United States)

Editorial Reviews

Whereas scientific literature tends to have a formal and concise style, the reader will enjoy the Tituses' engaging, accessible and conversational style. The tone is that of a chat between friends, rather than a university lecture.
—Kaatskill Life magazine

Stephen L. Nightingale