THE CATSKILL GEOLOGISTS BY PROFESSORS ROBERT AND JOHANNA TITUS - A Shallow Sea at the Top of the World

CATSKILL - Last week we climbed to the top of North Point in the eastern Catskills and saw the geology there. This week let’s do the big one. What would the two of us do if we were to reach the top of Mt Everest? Yep, of course, you guessed it; we would look at the rocks! Well, that is never going to happen but fortunately there have been several geologists who have scaled the mountain and did look at the rocks. That was actually a long-time goal of our science. Geologists wondered what kind of rocks could be at an elevation of over 29,000 feet and how did they get there? They found some remarkable categories up there and there is a lot that can be learned from them. Those rocks were limestones, and they belong to a unit of rock poetically called the Qomolangma Formation.

A shallow tropical sea;

You have probably heard the word limestone, but do you really know much or even anything about that type of rock? Maybe - or maybe not. If you climbed to the top of Mt. Everest and picked up a piece, then you would first see a mass of gray lithology. But if you looked carefully then you would likely start seeing bits and pieces of fossils. If you were lucky, you would see a piece of coral. Then you would probably see some shells. Those would almost certainly belong to creatures called brachiopods. There just might be a clam there too. If we were up there standing next to you, we would point here and there and say words like trilobite, crinoid, conodont, and ostracod. We would take some rock home and be able to determine that there were microscopic fossil algae inside the rock.                                     

You don’t have to know the meaning of any or all of those words; they are, each of them, types of fossil invertebrate animals. They all lived in the salt waters of an ancient ocean. There are a lot of them in this limestone and that tells us that it was a diverse ecology. Limestone almost always forms in shallow tropical seas so now we have some very remarkable images. First, we see ourselves standing atop the summit of Mt. Everest. All around us is the snow and ice of a very highly elevated mountain top. But the rocks also speak to us of ancient times. Back then this site was not 29,000 feet in elevation; it was just a little below sea level. It wasn’t a frigid climate; it was tropical. Our visions tell us of a mountain peak; the rocks point toward a shallow Bahamas-like sea. They can’t both be right, can they? Yes, they can. Our modern senses speak to us accurately about what the Himalayas are today. The rocks indicate what it was like at the Mt. Everest site about 350 million years ago. 

What an adventure it must be to climb Everest. But if you do it as a geologist, then you climb to an elevation of 29,000 feet and arrive at the bottom of a tropical sea 350 million years into the past.

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