All posts by Robert and Johanna Titus

On the Rocks: A dark and stormy night

On the Rocks: A dark and stormy night

By the midnight of this awful night the storms had passed, and things had settled down. Where there had been colorful marine meadow, now there was the barren desolation of a fresh 10-inch thick deposit of coarse sediment. Few seafloor creatures were still alive; many had been broken up into a shell hash. As the moon rose over the dark sea floor, the last grains of the finer, lighter sediments were falling out of suspension like a marine dust. The new deposit was settling and compacting under its own weight. It was beginning a long process that would very slowly turn it into limestone. That limestone is still there, exposed along Rte. 9W.

On the rocks: Catskill clams

On the rocks: Catskill clams

Do clams have consciousness? Did our clams experience fear? Did they have any awareness of what had befallen them? Did they actually decide what to do? We really don’t know. We suspect that they may well have been equipped with some sort of automatic response system that allowed them to deal with what should have been a scary situation. We guess that we will never know for sure.

Cliffs and waterfalls in the Catskills

Cliffs and waterfalls in the Catskills

To geologists, there is a simple question. How did these waterfalls, with their hazards, come into existence? Haven’t waterfalls just always been there? Well no they haven’t; they were brought into existence by geological processes. We just have to be observant enough to figure out those processes.