By David B. Williams
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Extra resources for Stories in Stone: Travels Through Urban Geology
Sample text
You can see how water and ice infiltrate and ferret out the weakest links in a rock and slowly reduce it to its constituent grains. A solid in geologic time is not truly a solid, and it will surrender to an overriding principle of nature—gravity; what goes up must come down, even if it takes millions of years or in the case of the hapless brownstones, decades. The basic geologic story of brownstone is simple and appealing. Go back 200 million years. Streams wash into a valley and deposit layer upon layer of sand and silt.
And then, as the continents continued to pull apart, Earth’s crust thinned and the Hartford Basin ripped open, like an overstuffed sausage. Black lava spread from swarms of fissures in Connecticut and all of the rift valleys that stretched for a thousand miles along the eastern margin of North America. With a consistency of ketchup, the basalt flowed thousands of yards per day. In addition to wreaking havoc on the landscape, the viscous basalt spewed out trillions of tons of sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide, generally making the planet an unpleasant place for any species that liked clean air.
Lyell’s book helped establish that Earth was not created six thousand years ago but must be very old because geologic phenomena, such as erosion and deposition, occurred so slowly that vast expanses of time were necessary to produce the planet’s varied landscapes. A third great advance came from Swiss-born geologist Louis Agassiz, whose Étude sur les glaciers in 1840 established the importance of ice in sculpting landscape. Agassiz showed that a great and geologically recent ice age was responsible for ice sheets that carved valleys, shoved moraines, and carried erratic boulders.