The flow of time in the Connecticut valley : $b geological imprints — John Shaqi
The flow of time in the Connecticut valley : $b geological imprintsBain, George W. (George William)
Science
The flow of time in the Connecticut valley : $b geological imprints
Bain, George W. (George William)
Geology -- Connecticut River Valley
Some of these three-toed animals were like the modern lizards and walked
on all four feet; but the great majority walked on two feet and, like
the kangaroos, used their tails to balance their bodies, and their short
fore limbs to support them when they crouched. In any single playa
deposit, variations in the sizes and kinds of footprints reveal that
many individuals made them; yet strangely, most of the tracks at any one
place are headed in a single direction. Apparently the herd instinct
must have been strong in these reptiles, as it is in kangaroos or in a
flock of turkeys, all following a leader, with only an occasional
individual going off to one side or back-tracking in a display of
independence. And so the dinosaurs dominated the life in the early
Connecticut basin, as it sank and trembled, and as mountains rose to the
east; on dry days and days of cloudburst, on hot days and days when
frost crystals formed in the mud, they roamed the plain, as the lowland
settled nearly two miles and filled to the brim with red sands, muds,
and marginal gravels.
_Volcanoes_
Red is the predominant color in the central inlay of the New England
design, but greens and blue-black lines have been worked into the
pattern. The dinosaur-ridden basin has a rim south of Middletown in
Connecticut, and another north of Holyoke in Massachusetts; it lies just
west of the dinosaur-track ledge near Holyoke, and the tracks themselves
are only thirty feet above the bottom of the basin. The rim is an odd
ensemble—now red and now green; here solid and hard and black, there
soft and fragmental and crumbly. The fragments may be angular or round;
sandy or glassy; dense and solid, or full of bubble holes like molasses
taffy. The whole looks like the spread-out ash dump from a giant power
plant. And not only does it resemble an ash heap—it _is_ the ash heap of
a volcano; and the hard black layers within it are lava flows
interspersed with the heavy falls of ash.
[Illustration: Fig. 8. _Map showing agglomerate burying a fault
scarp on the power line through the east gap of the Notch._]
The ancient ash heap grows thicker east of the Connecticut River, and it
is more than 3,000 feet from top to bottom around a series of massive
blue-black rock-columns southeast of the Mount Holyoke Hotel. These are
the lava-filled necks of craters which became quiescent with the dawn of
the dinosaur days. The ash deposit, called the Granby tuff, grows
thinner eastward away from the craters and disappears completely
northeast of Granby, where a stream deploying from a valley in the
eastern mountains washed it away as fast as it fell and left coarse
gravel in the form of a huge fan.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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