THE CATSKILL GEOLOGISTS BY PROFESSORS ROBERT AND JOHANNA TITUS A Glacier Atop Kaaterskill Falls

CATSKILL - Scientific research always begins with finding the evidence. The two of us know that; after all we have done a lot of research over the years. But let’s tell you something about that. Every so often the evidence tells you something that is uncomfortable – something just doesn’t feel exactly right. But if that is what the evidence tells you, then  it is what it is.

We thought these sorts of things recently at the very top of Kaaterskill Falls. It’s been dry lately and so we took the opportunity to take a good look at the stratified rocks that are up there but usually underwater. Take a look at our photo. That’s a close-up view of a pebble buried inside the old sandstone that’s at the very top of the falls. That’s nice and it is something that we see a lot. This pebble came to be buried with all the surrounding sand of this sandstone. That was perhaps 380 million years ago. But notice that the top of the pebble has been shaved off. That gives it a flat top and that flat top lies exactly at the level of the surrounding rock. That is so unlikely – and it’s unlikely on two levels. First, pebbles should not have flat tops; they should be rounded. Also, at least some of that pebble should rise above the level of that bedrock. And it all got worse; we looked around and found at least three more of these shaved off pebbles.

This was, indeed, unusual; it needed some explanation. Well, we are pros, we knew right away what we were looking at. In fact, we have written about this sort of thing before. These pebbles have, indeed, been planed off. That was during the Ice Age when a glacier passed across this surface. The advancing ice sheared off the upper halves of each pebble. We stood up and looked downstream. We traveled back through time and watched as a glacier rose up from below us. It slowly approached and we had to turn to our left and climb uphill to get out of its way. We turned again and watched it pass by, heading towards today’s South Lake. Along the way, it was doing that damage to our pebbles.

What an experience this was; it’s something that only a geologist could do. But we felt uncomfortable about this. We looked again. We were there on a warm and sunny late summer day. Glaciers just seemed like such unlikely events. But – there was the evidence, lying at our feet. 

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