Introduction
In 1872, a naturalist and surveyor by the name of Verplanck Colvin found the source of the Hudson River. It is a small pond on the south…show more content… And so, the geography of the Hudson River today ends here in Manhattan, but the geology of what lies underneath is much more important. Continue reading if you must, and dwell into a mystery of time and a lot of pushing and pulling.
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Do not worry about this happening now though because the rivers overall slope has not changed more than a centimeter in the last couple thousand years and shows no signs of speeding up.
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Hudson River Formation
The Geology of the Hudson River is complex. Billions of years of folding, pushing, pulling, separating, and moving have formed, deformed and reformed the Hudson River valley into what it is today, a “giant palimpsest6, a great parchment on which the hand of nature has written and rewritten her bold signature for more than a billion years”7. In the next section, I am going to attempt to condense over a billion years worth of Geologic History into less than ten pages. Despite complex knowledge and strange words it is a simple story of time and rocks, moving and changing: the formation of the Hudson River and its valley. The Hudson’s geological “personality” very much reflects its structure and the changes made on it, underneath it and all around it from the Pleistocene glaciations8 . The bedrock foundation of the Hudson was established in the space of three oregany’s (mountain building periods)
