THE CATSKILL GEOLOGISTS BY PROFESSORS ROBERT AND JOHANNA TITUS - The Glaciers at Twilight Park Part One

CATSKILL - Recently Robert was invited to speak at Twilight Park. Its residents were curious about their ice age history; could Robert explain it to them? Have you ever been to Twilight Park? It has a spectacular view of Kaaterskill Clove. See our photo. As luck would have it, Robert would be speaking with that exact landscape right behind him. With that backdrop, Robert decided that he would not try to explain the Ice Age here but to portray the vastness of the Clove’s ice age past. He would attempt to draw a verbal picture of what it was like back then. He wanted his audience to see what he saw when he looked at that view. What would all of them see if they were transported back in time to the late Ice Age? Since then, the two of us have been writing up a version of that talk and we would like to begin that here in this week’s column. We will finish our story next week. 

Aug 29th, 11,975 BC – We are the mind’s eye; we can go anywhere; we can do anything; we can travel through time. We stand at the top of Kaaterskill Clove on this late “summer” ice age day. We have found our way to exactly where Robert will speak 14,000 years from now. Before us lies the clove as it was back then. It is the end of this day’s nighttime hours, and dawn is approaching quickly. As the sunlight brightens, we see that the clove is filled with fog. All around us there is a dense mist. We kneel and take a close look into a foliage of weeds and grass. Nearby are some rocks encrusted with moss and lichens. We look around and notice that there are no tree trunks. What a strange thing to see such a primitive foliage in what should be our heavily forested Catskills.

The sun continues to rise. It is becoming what, by ice age standards, is a hot day. In an hour or so it burns through the fog. We look out and now see all of Kaaterskill Clove. It is bare of trees.  All this is what ecologists call tundra. The Ice Age has been taking a break. There had, previously, been several advances of the ice but this has been an interglacial period. We look down to the bottom of the clove and spy a cluster of very young pines. The forest has been attempting to return. But we look again and get out a pair of binoculars. We see that these pines are dead. What is going on?

We are the mind’s eye, and we can rise up into the sky and hang high up in the air and watch as years pass by below us. We scan the Hudson Valley just below the Catskill Front. A great mass of something appears to the north. It is purple in the dim morning light, then it turns green and yellow as the sun rises. At noon it is a gleaming diamond white. In the afternoons the colors are reversed.  But what is this? We cannot tell; it is too far away. Then at some gleaming noon we look again and suddenly recognize what we have been looking at. It is a glacier, and the valley has been filling with ice. Once again.

We see that the Hudson Valley region is entering into a new cycle of glaciation. What a grim moment this is. Ice Age climates have already prevailed, off and on, for several million years. Will all this ever end?

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