Abstract
I live in central upstate New York, a land where, for about 2 million years, the North American Ice Age dominated the terrain. Climate changes during that time caused huge ice sheets to advance and retreat about four times, which ground down layer upon layer of hardened rock, taking away sediment from hundreds of thousands of years of deposition. As the ice made its final pass over the landscape, it completed digging the deep north-south trending troughs that stand as the Finger Lakes, modified the course of the Susquehanna River, dropped a drumlin field near Syracuse, and left behind long lines of sediment, such as a terminal moraine, or a deposit at the end of a glacial ice sheet, called Long Island. Exposed in midstate were the dull-colored, 395-million-year-old Devonian shales and sandstones, sporadically capped by a hodgepodge of stones and dirt called glacial till.
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot
Sneaking Up on Earth
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Endnotes
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© 1996 Patricia Barnes-Svarney
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Barnes-Svarney, P. (1996). The Scarred and Cratered Earth. In: Asteroid. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6148-8_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6148-8_10
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