American Bio-Tech Wildlife Services: Beneath Our Feet, Part I

When I was a young boy, perhaps seven or eight years of age, my grandfather invited me on a field trip with him to a local quarry to collect large rocks necessary for a goldfish water garden he would eventually construct in the backyard. Early the following day and after a hearty breakfast and a cautionary lecture from my grandmother regarding safety precautions, off we went on our great adventure. From what I now recall, this abandoned quarry was 50-70ft deep with a shallow lake bottom and vegetation marking its boundaries. The rocks we wrestled off the steep slopes were a limestone conglomerate, which is a rock comprised of limestone cementing small gravel-like stones and mixed with various fossils dating back to the Middle Devonian Period, some 390 million years ago. The rocks we procured had very sharp porous edges with distinctive cherty sponge fossils distributed throughout. As a young boy I was fascinated with the variety of these ancient creatures created in stone. Years later I would return to the same quarry with my students to investigate this wide assortment of fossilized lifeforms, including mollusks, sponges, corrals, crinoids, trilobites, and eurypterids. As I look back, I couldn’t help but wonder if these geology field trips I brought these young investigators on would somehow spark a lifetime interest in pursuing a career in geology or some related field.

This particular quarry I took a fascination with was located in Western New York State outside of Buffalo, in a geological formation called the Onondaga Escarpment. Because of its hardness, this escarpment is essentially all that remains of an ancient seabed that survived numerous glacial advances and contractions. The hardness of this escarpment protected the softer shales and dolomites underneath shielding them from the movement of glacial advances.

When I moved to Connecticut, the geology here opened an entirely new set of discoveries and for us now to understand the basic geology of this area we need to go back in time some 541 million years ago to what is referred to as the Cambrian Explosion. Prior to this time our Pre-Cambrian world made up some 80% of this geological time clock, beginning some 4.6 billion years ago when earth was nothing more than a volcanic hellscape of molten fire. Over time trillions of asteroids made up principally of ice would bombard our planet bringing us water, which initiated the cooling of earth’s surface. This cooling process over millions of years allowed a crust to form while at the same time producing atmospheric oxygen. The advent of water and oxygen eventually would bring us to the Cambrian Explosion, which essentially is a rapid expansion of water and oxygen allowing simple single cell lifeforms, like sponges and jellyfish to evolve and flourish in this enriched climate.

Accompanying this rapid evolution of advances in lifeforms, the continental crusts themselves would remain very active separating in large masses, or islands, only in time to reunite, or amalgamate once again. This landmass drifting and dividing was powered by enormous pressures within the earth, which generated plumes of magma deep below the mantle resulting in continuous separation of land formations and ultimately its reformation. The constant separation and reforming process over millions of years continually produced new oceans and ever-increasing mountain ranges.

Here in Connecticut on our eastern seaboard, the action of continued drifting augmented by the eventual collision of what we know of as North America and Africa produced one single land mass referred to as Pangea. This colossal collision occurred some 300 million years ago. Eventually once again this single landmass, Pangea, would begin breaking up and drifting due to internal pressures and plate tectonics, forming our present-day continents of North America and Africa.

Here in Connecticut the forces of this continental drift and collision with the African continent pushed vast quantities of ocean coral and diatoms inland resulting in our current limestone deposits stretching from Maine to Florida. Additionally, resulting from this collision with its massive heat and pressure as the earth’s crust buckled like an accordion, forming the Appalachian orogeny, which is what we now call the Appalachian and Allegheny Mountains stretching from Alabama to Newfoundland. Keep in mind these ancient mountain ranges were once as high as the Rockies are today.

However, over the course of the last 250 million years, they have eroded into their current elevations spreading sediment and debris east and west of their range. As a result of hundreds of millions of years of this extreme heat and pressure, Connecticut’s geological formation, would be blessed with an abundance of various chemical elements and useful rock formations. Early Connecticut settlers found numerous practical uses for these elements. Because of these vast resources, various types of mining in our state would become a leading source of revenue for dozens of towns. In our next article for the New Milford magazine titled Beneath Our Feet, Part II, we will examine these early mining activities in our state and what economic impact it would create that literally changed the course of history.