THE CATSKILL GEOLOGISTS BY PROFESSORS ROBERT AND JOHANNA TITUS - The Jefferson Heights “Flats”

When you are obliged to get out a new column every week then you need to always be alert for new topics. The process has changed for us over the decades. The technology of our fieldwork has advanced. Nowadays we, of course, always have our cellphone cameras with us everywhere we go - 24/7. It’s not the least bit unusual, when we are driving down a highway, for one of us to say, “there’s one.” That happens when one of us sees a potential column. We pull over and take a picture. Later we go to work, turning that photo into the centerpiece of a new column. It’s very hard to write and explain a science column without one or two pictures.

Well, recently were driving down the main road of Jefferson Heights near the town of Catskill and one of us said “There’s good one.” We pulled over and took the picture you see here. It’s the centerpiece of this week’s column. But what’s there? Is there anything there? The Jefferson Heights Road is straight as an arrow. It runs across a landscape that is as flat as a pancake. This is certainly no Grand Canyon or even a Kaaterskill Clove; this is really flat! If a landscape can be called boring, then this is it. Where are the rocks? Where are the sediments? So, how on earth were we going to turn it into a column?

Well, we just happened to know something special about Jefferson Heights. And we were soon thinking about that special thing as we stood along the side of the road. As is so often the case, we became the mind’s eyes. We found ourselves traveling backwards through time. We arrived on the date of May 1, 12,974 BC. It was mid-afternoon. There we were in what would someday be that very location on the side of that road. It was very different. We were standing knee deep in water. We felt a current flowing toward us and then passed under us and off to the southeast. The water was dirty with suspended silt and clay. Sand was carried along at the very bottom of the flow.

We, the mind’s eyes, rose up into the air above. From a high up vantagepoint we were about to truly understand what we had been experiencing. There were nearby lands, but they were barren of any extensive foliage. This was the tundra of a late Ice Age landscape. We looked to the northwest and saw a distant Catskill Creek: glutted with massive volumes of meltwater. This was the source of those currents and that sediment. It was flowing into a lake and depositing a delta. Deltas always have flat tops so now we actually understood the top of Jefferson Heights. Then we turned to the southeast and saw before us the dark and deeper waters of a sizable glacial lake. Those were more waters from melting glaciers. This was something called Glacial Lake Albany. It blanketed all that is today the town of Catskill and stretched off to the south as far as we could see. We rose still higher into the sky but just could not find a southern end to the lake.

And then – poof – we returned to the present. There was that hitherto nondescript flat surface. It had been so unremarkable just minutes before. But now our time travel had presented such a fascinating new meaning to us. We had discovered Jefferson Heights to be an Ice Age delta in an ice Age lake.

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