THE CATSKILL GEOLOGISTS BY PROFESSORS ROBERT AND JOHANNA TITUS - A Convenient Truth, Part One

CATSKILL - With an illustration by Karl Anshanslin

After losing the 2000 presidential election, former senator Al Gore set about the beginning of a major career change. He wrote a very influential book “An Inconvenient Truth.” In the book, and later in the movie, he documented the evidence for a warming worldwide climate. Within both of these you can find before-and-after illustrations of glaciers that have been melting away in recent decades. The story was pretty much the same wherever he looked; he found glaciers thawing all across the globe. He feared the effects of this upon the world’s ecologies. How many extinctions would follow this great melt You can certainly get the book from your local library, and we recommend that you look at the photos on pages 51-57. They show the before and after melting back of the glaciers in a number of locations. You have probably also seen similar illustrations elsewhere.

Well, the long and the short of this is that you would hardly imagine that we could do something similar in terms of illustrating another major warming event – the final melting of the Pleistocene glaciers, perhaps about 14,000 years ago. We are talking about the good global warming, the one that made the world far more habitable for our own species. Let’s call that a convenient truth: the one that made upstate New York habitable for humans. The two of us think that we can actually see this. And the other long and the short of it is that we think we can see this right here in our favorite part of the Catskills – the Blue Trail, just north of North Lake. Yep, that’s where we were last week. And you can see global warming right there; it will be the topic of this and next week’s column. We want to solve some of the puzzles we found last week. Go to the North Lake parking lot and head north on the Blue Trail. Take a look at last week’s photo and today’s first photo. We would like it if you hiked to the top of that arrow on the map.

You have taken the Blue Trail up to a site called “Badman’s Cave.” That will be a lot easier if you bring along someone who has already been there. Right there are the upper reaches of a canyon that drops about 350 feet down to Mary’s Glen. Our blue arrow traces this canyon. See our second photo. That’s a vertical Badman’s Canyon wall on the right and the canyon floor to the left. But there is no stream here. What a curious feature this is. It is, indeed, a canyon but there is not a drop of water in it. That seems impossible, doesn’t it? How can there be a canyon without the stream that carved it? We saw this many years ago and guessed the answer right away. We turned around, looked to the east, and, in our mind’s eye, we gazed into the late ice age past. We saw a glacier abutting the Catskill Front right here. We were looking into the latest chapter of the last Ice Age and the climate was warming – fast. Vast volumes of meltwater were pouring out of the melting ice and torrents of this were roaring past us. That was downhill and off to the southwest. The noise was almost painful. This was not just a loud flow, but it was also a very erosive one. Those raging floodwaters were cutting into the bedrock. We stood there, transfixed, and watched all of this – these were the origins of that mysterious Badman’s Canyon.

But this is just the beginning of the story. Al Gore would have made this a “before” image. We need at least one “after” – don’t we? Let’s pick up on this next week.

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