The “Boiling Pot” at Canajoharie

THE CATSKILLS - You know what they always say about the few who ruin things for the many, right? Well, that’s happening right now along a picturesque creek in the town of Canajoharie. It’s a very pretty location and has attracted visitors for generations. A late Ice Age flow of meltwater cut into the limestone and black shale there and left a pretty canyon. It’s long been open to the public. We have visited the site and studied the abundant fossils that can be seen there.

Well, in recent times too many people have been coming by. And too many of those carry knives and other weapons and bring foul tempers. Brawls have broken out. Many arrests have been made but the site has become dangerous and has been ruled off limits this past month. The two of us were stunned to hear this. After all, Canajoharie should be and always has been a peaceful place. But what can you do; people are people, and many of them are idiots. They have turned a beautiful natural wonder into a crime scene!

The star of the show at Canajoharie Creek has always been something that has been called “the Boiling Pot.” No, there is no hot water there, but there is a pot. That’s perfectly circular pool of water which is 20 feet across and about ten feet deep. All around the pot is 450-million-year-old Ordovician aged limestone. See our photo, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. During springtime floods, it often does indeed look like it is boiling.

You might think that there is a good geological story here and you would be right. That story takes us back to the end of the Ice Age. That’s when enormous, genuinely vast quantities of meltwater were pouring off of nearby melting glaciers. That must have been quite a time in Canajoharie Creek. These flows would have been extremely erosive and the shales and limestones there weren’t very hard rocks so they couldn’t put up much of a fight against all that erosion. The currents would have cut the canyon we see here and,  now and then, they would have gone to work on something else – the boiling pot.

The technical term for this is “pothole.” These are common in the bedrock floors of strong streams that flow across once glaciated landscapes. Such powerful flows would normally be carrying a lot of sediment, much of that being quartz sand. The grains of sand would be carried along by the swirling motion that is typical in such a powerful flow. One at a time, those grains would slam into the bedrock. Each ping would exact a small toll. Just the tiniest imaginable bit of rock would be chipped away - but there was so much sand and there were so many pings. Over time a cavity would form and then, as the process continued, that cavity would evolve into a circular hole and that would become a boiling pothole.

These are common all across the northeast in areas that were glaciated. That’s pretty much everywhere. If you develop an eye for them, you will commonly see them. Our column is always about training your eyes. We hope that we have, once again, been successful.

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