This is a picture from Riverside Park. It is a rocky outcrop called Mount Tom next to W83rd Str. Somewhere I read that Edgar Allan Poe liked to come here and observe the Hudson River.
Yet this rocky knob itself has an even older and more interesting history to tell. It is made of rock called Manhattan Schist. It formed 270 million years ago under the mountains which were at that time taller than today’s Himalayas. Those mountains are long gone; only their roots remain in the form of this rounded rock and bedrock under half of Manhattan.
This Manhattan Schist is composed of nicely folded layers with occasional intruding veins of quartz. Yet here, and in a few other places, you can clearly see some straight grooves going perpendicular to the natural layers and folds in the rock. These groves are called glacial striation and are in fact about twenty five thousand years old wounds and scars left behind by the Wisconsin glacier. These scars were made by stones embedded at the bottom of glacier as it slid towards the ocean.
This is just one rock from our neighborhood relating ancient stories. This Sunday we will open the Bible and let it speak to us about Geology. We will initiate a trialogue between Bible, geology and spirituality hoping it will open and deepen our faith and also our understanding of ourselves and of us in the world.
Yet this rocky knob itself has an even older and more interesting history to tell. It is made of rock called Manhattan Schist. It formed 270 million years ago under the mountains which were at that time taller than today’s Himalayas. Those mountains are long gone; only their roots remain in the form of this rounded rock and bedrock under half of Manhattan.
This Manhattan Schist is composed of nicely folded layers with occasional intruding veins of quartz. Yet here, and in a few other places, you can clearly see some straight grooves going perpendicular to the natural layers and folds in the rock. These groves are called glacial striation and are in fact about twenty five thousand years old wounds and scars left behind by the Wisconsin glacier. These scars were made by stones embedded at the bottom of glacier as it slid towards the ocean.
This is just one rock from our neighborhood relating ancient stories. This Sunday we will open the Bible and let it speak to us about Geology. We will initiate a trialogue between Bible, geology and spirituality hoping it will open and deepen our faith and also our understanding of ourselves and of us in the world.
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