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Fascinating folding there, Shawn. It's fair to assume that very few people who walk past those outcrops even think about the geology, and never notice that folding. Thanks! 🙂👍
Like so many geologic names in the US, Taconic (orogeny) and Manhattan (the borough, the island, and the schist) have indigenous origins. The Taconic mountains derive from an Alqonquian word relating to trees or forest. Manhattan, from the same language family, means 'the forest or thicket where we got the wood for our bows.' The Lenape (or Delaware) people spoke Munsee, the local Alqonquian dialect. There are a handful of Munsee speakers left in Ontario, one of the places to which they were displaced by the incoming settlers. Lenape means 'real person/people.'
Thank you for putting the names in historical context! If Shawn will do some further exploration of the Hudson Valley, he will find more Algonquian names, in addition to English and Dutch names for geographic and geologic features.
Allegheny (mountains, region, orogeny) is another Lenape derived term for good or beautiful river. Acadian (region, orogeny) has two potential origins, one from the Greek Arcadia, a pastoral paradise, and one from MiqMaq, another Algonquian tribe and dialect from further north, in the Canadian maritimes. The French settlers applied the term Acadia to the broader northeastern coastal region. When the British expelled some of the French from the region, the latter resettled in Louisiana (then French territory) and Acadian was worn down to Cajun...!
This type of contribution (of which there are a couple here present) really adds a valuable cultural dimension to the already exciting geology. It's good to know the original inhabitants and their languages are not forgotten. .❤
This video inspired me to read about the parks I grew up with in Brooklyn and Manhattan. I learned that the “terminal moraine” left by the glaciers was considered too difficult to build on or in, and so those areas were used for cemeteries and parks. Geology in action providing an enormous benefit to the city’s population. I went to college at Barnard, next to Columbia University, and so Morningside Heights and Riverside Park were my neighbors. Unfortunately, during the 60s they were considered too dangerous to walk in, but my apartment overlooked Riverside Park and the Hudson River, and my occasional daytime forays into the park were never interrupted by crime.
When I’ve been in Manhattan, I felt like I was living in an entirely human-made machine. Thank goodness for the natural elements in Central Park. There’s something fundamentally cool about the bedrock and erratics, just sittin’ around, minding their own business, -Ho hum- as if they weren’t there because of titanic geological forces. I like geology for the sense of awe it inspires.
I always think that East coast geology is boring. Apparently, I was wrong. I used to sit on some of those rocks when I was living in NYC, and never thought about them. LOL.
That’s funny because I always thought of west coast geology as more boring (being so much sedimentary stone) while the NE has had so many transformations - feels like if you walk a thousand feet in any direction in my area of Massachusetts and you encounter wildly different rock from vastly different eras. But Shawn and others have shown west coast geology to be fascinating as well - Guess the lesson is that it’s all interesting!
Thanks, Shawn. It was really fun to tag along in Central Park. Eastern US geology is so different from our western. Several of my family live in the east, so I've looked up research papers and read Roadside Guides. That makes travel very exciting!
Thank you, your videos are just incredible, you have such a fabulous way of explaining the geology of everything !! You don't bamboozle me with correct terminology and keep everything interesting too. I live in Newtonmore, Scotland and after watching your video today I understood alot more of what I see on the ground over here where I live
The Central Park video is great. Growing up in NYC and learning earth science there you build an hands on appreciation of the forces that shaped the area. You were so close to the Palisades on the New Jersey side of the Hudson and hope in a future video you can bring your wonderful teaching style to this fascinating geology.
I grew up on Long Island and went on field trips to see the geology of central park and other locals close by. There are some great road cuts around NYC.
I'm very happy you got a chance to visit Central Park and share this video with us. I grew up in Manhattan and know all these outcrops very well. Still you showed us folds and other features I had never noticed. Thanks, Shawn!
You know it has been a good vacation when you need to go home and get a break. A lot of sub-surface geology is reflected in the skyline across the island. Tall buildings on each end that likely sit on that schist and shorter buildings in between. Thank you Professor, now get some sleep!
That's exactly why. The bedrock is closer to the surface at the top and bottom ends of the island, so they don't have to dig far to get to it to secure the foundations for those mega-skyscrapers in hard rock. But in midtown that formation dives deeper, making it more expensive to dig to the bedrock in order to build big. So the buildings in that area are all much smaller.
So glad you could stop by the "Local Orogeny"...if you thought that schist was cool, you should see our unconformities! Congratulations on the "Emmy"...and keep up the great work Professor Willsey!
Thanks Shawn. I love Central Park and live in NYC. Now I want to go find these outcrops. I love climbing on the rocks in Central Park. I love you other videos and livestreaming. I love learning about geology.
Thank you @shawnwillsey I really enjoyed this video! You are so easy to listen to, I have already learned a lot from you. Thanks for the geologic ride! 🤗
I bet you'd love Michigan, the Pictured Rocks in Munising are quite beautiful and fascinating to see. Upper Peninsula is one big rock hounds paradise, right on the shore of the lakes.
How to get the most out of a short cycle ride ! What a difference - those rocks are the same period as our North Wales Slates (also a metamorphosed rock but a mudstone I think) but soo different ! Thank for taking time out of your family holiday to give us this.
Great to see you looking at the very different geology of the northeast part of the USA. I grew up in the general area and studied geology in New Hampshire that has similar schists and gneiss. The combination of 400 million year old metamorphic rocks and the Pleistocene glacier effects is very different from the geology of the western part of the USA.
Glad you got to Central Park. It provides such a respite from the hubbub of the city. And yes, beautiful Manhattan Schist. And It does provide a solid base for all the built structures on the island. I wonder if this rock was used as a building stone around the city? Thanks for a great geology in the park episode.
It makes me excited to see Shawn in my neck of the woods! There's an erratic in nj not far from the city called tripod Rock. Its an enormous boulder that is resting on three smaller boulders and you can crawl underneath. Nice hike. Thanks for these videos. And I hope you enjoyed your stay in nyc!!
Great video. There's also some good Geology just to the west in New Jersey. Maybe just 30 miles west of NYC you have three different basalt ridges from the breakup of Pangea. And then of course the Delaware Water Gap has some excellent geology.
Hi Shawn, can you elaborate more about this? Mount Ruang, a 725-meter (2,400-foot) volcano on Ruang Island, North Sulawesi, has erupted at least five times since Tuesday night, spewing fiery lava and ash plumes thousands of feet into the sky, the country's volcanology agency said.
I'm not Shawn obviously, but from what I understand so far the chief concern with Ruang is the possibility that one or more sides of the cone could collapse if enough lava extrudes from the cone and it can't support itself; that of course would result in a sizable tsunami, and being so close to a town on another island close by (16 miles), it has forced the evacuation of just about everybody from the town until Ruang is done playing out. Ruang is spewing a LOT of SO₂ into the stratosphere, which depending on how long this goes and how many millions of tons of SO₂ is pumped out, it could have a cooling effect on average temps for awhile. As explosive yet red hot as the lava is I'm curious as to the silica content of the lava. Lots of ash, lots of scoria, but has the color of molten basalt.
Most interested in the gas & particulates it’s putting way up in the atmosphere. Coupled with other volcanoes going off could it cause some global cooling? How much does it take for that to happen?
@@briane173 I was reading that it had at one point a two-kilometer tall lava fountain blasting out. You can kind of see it in videos, but it is mostly obscured by the ash clouds. Wild.
nice report! at Summit Rock (which is also the highest natural point of Central Park) the outcrop was excavated to make room for the Central Park West avenue, and now at the intersection with 83rd street there's a huge, vertical and crumbling wall. Coincidentally very close to the Natural History museum. I took a piece of Manhattan Schist there in 2017 and brought back to Italy
The only reasons I’d ever go to NYC: natural history museum, NY botanic garden, the public library, and Central Park, with this being the key feature of the park I’d like to see.
Shawn, I presume that the glacial striations on all the outcrop examples lineup or are parallel to each other? It would be cool to see a lidar map of the area looking at the outcrops. Any perpendicular striation oddities from other advances? Thanks for the tour.
I grew up across the Hudson in Rockland County NY. My first climbing was in Harriman park and the Palisades cliffs. Then the Gunks. My mom lives right next to the Ramapo fault. Everywhere are glacier polished striated bed rock and erratic boulders. I had always heard there’s a Palisades cliffs ( crude basalt columns) connection to Africa.
In your exploration of the geology of Central Park did you come across any local chalk deposition sites dating from the Anthropocene? I have observed that these chalk deposits tend to violate the geologic principle that deposition occurs in horizontal layers in that they are usually found on nearly vertical surfaces.
I was curious about the two major cracks (perpendicular to the layering in the schist) which were clearly visible in the second schist outcrop (the one with the large erratic boulder - see [7:48]). In fact, I had initially thought that this was maybe what had caught your eye and drawn you to this outcrop. Any idea about the source of those cracks? My first guess was a geological/tectonic fault but my mental image of a fault is something of a more significant scale. Perhaps they are simple fractures during glaciation?
While this is an engineering observation, keep in mind that Manhattan Schist is not just a tourist attraction in Central Park. It is also the foundation of Manhattan's high rise architecture.
Hi Shawn interesting rocks with exposed mica schist, those are also the rocks which allow the tall skyscrapers to be built there on hard rock foundations to. That said I'm going to call out that this isn't really a "pocket of nature" in a literal sense as while there are trees it looks to basically one giant "lawnscape", though some of that could in principal be animal maintained by larger grazers or huge amounts of deer over browsing if any deer remain in Central Park but as far as I am aware none of that is present in central park, and I doubt that could fully explain the uniformly denude landscapes I've seen there. Either way like any other "lawn like" environment it is a wholly artificial ecological desert wasteland environment which can only be maintained by regular heavy disturbance from gas guzzling machinery and fossil fuel derived chemical fertilizers and pesticides by an industry which views plants as disposable decorations rather than living things and thus utterly neglects and tramples the soil into oblivion for the pointless task of murdering anything that isn't lawn monoculture wasteland. That means there isn't an intact soil profile and leaf removal cuts the available resources from primary production of a temperate forest by upwards of 80%. And lets not forget that ground compactification turns what little soil remains into impermeable layers which in combination with the rocks and city hardscapes means there is no where for water to go but to run off. In summary Central Park at least the areas I've seen can only be called "nature" in the sense that it isn't wall to wall towering skyscrapers and pedestrian deathtrap streets. I feel this is an important point to bring up because beyond the common sense solution of cutting the stupid unnecessary use of hydrocarbons for nonproductive tasks like mowing, one of the easiest ways we can really start to drawdown carbon through land use beyond cutting fossil fuels is to stop destroying the soil which forms the basis for life on land. I can understand the want for pasture height land where people can run around and play but do we really need so much of this artificial death scape which can only persist because we spend billions of dollars to stomp down natural rejuvenation of landscapes with our heavy carbon footprints, for no reason other than the propaganda of what landscapes should look like funded directly by the fossil fuel industry and its subsidiaries. Its one industry which if ended would make the world a better place for everyone in terms of quality of life, i.e. the workers doing it are exposed to toxic high doses of chemicals and bad air quality pollutants for little to no pay all to maintain a toxic wasteland so we can run around and give our dogs and kids cancer. Life not lawns!
Hi. Those wide areas of bare rock are common in my home area. Glaciated (heavily scored) rock never gained a topsoil due (??) to coastal weather, strong persistent westerly wind off the Atlantic and high rainfall keep it pristine bare. Valley bottoms collect sediment and support scrub woodland (mixed with tormented sessile oak) and bog myrtle. Grazing is minimal. The features have nothing to do with lawn culture as there is only a minute human footprint. If you are interested check out glacial landscapes of Snowdonia (Parc Eryri) North Wales - UK.
Most of what he was looking at is bedrock, so yes, it's native. It's the same rock you find underlying most of Manhattan. I'm guessing that erratic comes from the Palisades sill, which runs north-south just west of Manhattan for a considerable distance in both directions. Its rock was quarried for a lot of purposes back in the day, so I can't swear that none of it wound up in Central Park deliberately. I don't know why anybody would leave such a large chunk of it on top of a random outcrop, though, so that's probably natural too. If not from the Palisades sill then somewhere else I don't know about. The actual landscape of the park is mostly not natural, bedrock aside. A large amount of earth-moving involved to turn it into what it is now. Took decades to fully construct. It's a cool place.
Please be sure to LIKE and SUBSCRIBE. You can support my educational videos by clicking on the "Thanks" button just above (right of Like button) or by going here: www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=EWUSLG3GBS5W8 or here: www.buymeacoffee.com/shawnwillsey
Fascinating folding there, Shawn. It's fair to assume that very few people who walk past those outcrops even think about the geology, and never notice that folding. Thanks! 🙂👍
Like so many geologic names in the US, Taconic (orogeny) and Manhattan (the borough, the island, and the schist) have indigenous origins. The Taconic mountains derive from an Alqonquian word relating to trees or forest. Manhattan, from the same language family, means 'the forest or thicket where we got the wood for our bows.' The Lenape (or Delaware) people spoke Munsee, the local Alqonquian dialect. There are a handful of Munsee speakers left in Ontario, one of the places to which they were displaced by the incoming settlers. Lenape means 'real person/people.'
Great comment. Provides added value to an already super presentation. Thanks.
Thank you for putting the names in historical context! If Shawn will do some further exploration of the Hudson Valley, he will find more Algonquian names, in addition to English and Dutch names for geographic and geologic features.
Schist, folds and an erratic, rock heaven.
Allegheny (mountains, region, orogeny) is another Lenape derived term for good or beautiful river. Acadian (region, orogeny) has two potential origins, one from the Greek Arcadia, a pastoral paradise, and one from MiqMaq, another Algonquian tribe and dialect from further north, in the Canadian maritimes. The French settlers applied the term Acadia to the broader northeastern coastal region. When the British expelled some of the French from the region, the latter resettled in Louisiana (then French territory) and Acadian was worn down to Cajun...!
@Steviepinhead You really know your history of the colonizatons and of the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. Ty
This type of contribution (of which there are a couple here present) really adds a valuable cultural dimension to the already exciting geology. It's good to know the original inhabitants and their languages are not forgotten. .❤
This video inspired me to read about the parks I grew up with in Brooklyn and Manhattan. I learned that the “terminal moraine” left by the glaciers was considered too difficult to build on or in, and so those areas were used for cemeteries and parks. Geology in action providing an enormous benefit to the city’s population. I went to college at Barnard, next to Columbia University, and so Morningside Heights and Riverside Park were my neighbors. Unfortunately, during the 60s they were considered too dangerous to walk in, but my apartment overlooked Riverside Park and the Hudson River, and my occasional daytime forays into the park were never interrupted by crime.
And can we talk about The Palisades and the glacial erratics?! Thank you for coming to NYC - we love our geology.
"Welcome to New York, schist's been waiting for you...."
When I’ve been in Manhattan, I felt like I was living in an entirely human-made machine. Thank goodness for the natural elements in Central Park. There’s something fundamentally cool about the bedrock and erratics, just sittin’ around, minding their own business, -Ho hum- as if they weren’t there because of titanic geological forces. I like geology for the sense of awe it inspires.
I always think that East coast geology is boring. Apparently, I was wrong. I used to sit on some of those rocks when I was living in NYC, and never thought about them. LOL.
That’s funny because I always thought of west coast geology as more boring (being so much sedimentary stone) while the NE has had so many transformations - feels like if you walk a thousand feet in any direction in my area of Massachusetts and you encounter wildly different rock from vastly different eras.
But Shawn and others have shown west coast geology to be fascinating as well - Guess the lesson is that it’s all interesting!
Thanks, Shawn. It was really fun to tag along in Central Park. Eastern US geology is so different from our western. Several of my family live in the east, so I've looked up research papers and read Roadside Guides. That makes travel very exciting!
Thank you, your videos are just incredible, you have such a fabulous way of explaining the geology of everything !! You don't bamboozle me with correct terminology and keep everything interesting too. I live in Newtonmore, Scotland and after watching your video today I understood alot more of what I see on the ground over here where I live
The Central Park video is great. Growing up in NYC and learning earth science there you build an hands on appreciation of the forces that shaped the area. You were so close to the Palisades on the New Jersey side of the Hudson and hope in a future video you can bring your wonderful teaching style to this fascinating geology.
I grew up on Long Island and went on field trips to see the geology of central park and other locals close by.
There are some great road cuts around NYC.
I'm very happy you got a chance to visit Central Park and share this video with us. I grew up in Manhattan and know all these outcrops very well. Still you showed us folds and other features I had never noticed. Thanks, Shawn!
So glad you enjoyed this.
6 seconds!!!! Perfect timing.
BTW, you can make your videos as long as you can. I'm positive I wouldn't be the one thrilled!
You know it has been a good vacation when you need to go home and get a break. A lot of sub-surface geology is reflected in the skyline across the island. Tall buildings on each end that likely sit on that schist and shorter buildings in between. Thank you Professor, now get some sleep!
That's exactly why. The bedrock is closer to the surface at the top and bottom ends of the island, so they don't have to dig far to get to it to secure the foundations for those mega-skyscrapers in hard rock. But in midtown that formation dives deeper, making it more expensive to dig to the bedrock in order to build big. So the buildings in that area are all much smaller.
Magnificent! I've never seen a better illustration of the folding in a rock. Thank you.
Thanks!
Thank you for your kind support of geology education.
So glad you could stop by the "Local Orogeny"...if you thought that schist was cool, you should see our unconformities! Congratulations on the "Emmy"...and keep up the great work Professor Willsey!
Ow boy, NY City gives me so many good and bad Memories.
Thanks Shawn. I love Central Park and live in NYC. Now I want to go find these outcrops. I love climbing on the rocks in Central Park. I love you other videos and livestreaming. I love learning about geology.
I grew up in Connecticut and this video made me a little homesick for glaciated rocks and the sparkling schist.
Watch your language
Thank you @shawnwillsey I really enjoyed this video! You are so easy to listen to, I have already learned a lot from you. Thanks for the geologic ride! 🤗
I have a nice sample of that schist in my collection. It was used to face upscale buildings in the late 19th and early 20th century,
Very interesting to know! Next time I’ll pay more attention to the outcrops while in Central Park.
I'm only 2.5 hours from NYC. I'll look at Central Park differently the next time I'm there. Thanks Shawn?
It was there that Amy Pond and Rory Williams sat on one of those out crops on Doctor Who. It was good that you showed this to the world. Thanks.
I bet you'd love Michigan, the Pictured Rocks in Munising are quite beautiful and fascinating to see. Upper Peninsula is one big rock hounds paradise, right on the shore of the lakes.
This was excellent! Proper end to a great vacation.
How to get the most out of a short cycle ride ! What a difference - those rocks are the same period as our North Wales Slates (also a metamorphosed rock but a mudstone I think) but soo different ! Thank for taking time out of your family holiday to give us this.
Great to see you looking at the very different geology of the northeast part of the USA. I grew up in the general area and studied geology in New Hampshire that has similar schists and gneiss. The combination of 400 million year old metamorphic rocks and the Pleistocene glacier effects is very different from the geology of the western part of the USA.
I've spent 30 years exploring Central Park. Manhattan schist, glacial eradics, glacial grooves... cool place.
Awesome! Thank you
This timed so well with the nova episode that aired this evening!
Great "random roadcut"! Very nice to know this.
When we went to NYC for a shirt trip, we spent a whoke day playing on the great rocks. I was in geological heaven
Glad you got to Central Park. It provides such a respite from the hubbub of the city. And yes, beautiful Manhattan Schist. And It does provide a solid base for all the built structures on the island. I wonder if this rock was used as a building stone around the city? Thanks for a great geology in the park episode.
Fascinating!! Thank you for a great segment. Interested in learning more about the side of the country that I live on!!
HI want to thank you and add this comment to improve your algorithm for TH-cam. this is a terrific channel.
I'm really enjoying your “travel geology” videos!
Thank you Professor
It makes me excited to see Shawn in my neck of the woods! There's an erratic in nj not far from the city called tripod Rock. Its an enormous boulder that is resting on three smaller boulders and you can crawl underneath. Nice hike. Thanks for these videos. And I hope you enjoyed your stay in nyc!!
Great video. There's also some good Geology just to the west in New Jersey. Maybe just 30 miles west of NYC you have three different basalt ridges from the breakup of Pangea. And then of course the Delaware Water Gap has some excellent geology.
excellent !
Great Video Shawn! Thank You!
Hi Shawn, can you elaborate more about this? Mount Ruang, a 725-meter (2,400-foot) volcano on Ruang Island, North Sulawesi, has erupted at least five times since Tuesday night, spewing fiery lava and ash plumes thousands of feet into the sky, the country's volcanology agency said.
I'm not Shawn obviously, but from what I understand so far the chief concern with Ruang is the possibility that one or more sides of the cone could collapse if enough lava extrudes from the cone and it can't support itself; that of course would result in a sizable tsunami, and being so close to a town on another island close by (16 miles), it has forced the evacuation of just about everybody from the town until Ruang is done playing out.
Ruang is spewing a LOT of SO₂ into the stratosphere, which depending on how long this goes and how many millions of tons of SO₂ is pumped out, it could have a cooling effect on average temps for awhile. As explosive yet red hot as the lava is I'm curious as to the silica content of the lava. Lots of ash, lots of scoria, but has the color of molten basalt.
Most interested in the gas & particulates it’s putting way up in the atmosphere. Coupled with other volcanoes going off could it cause some global cooling? How much does it take for that to happen?
@@briane173 I was reading that it had at one point a two-kilometer tall lava fountain blasting out. You can kind of see it in videos, but it is mostly obscured by the ash clouds. Wild.
@@rickeyamar1113 Way, way more than this. This isn't even unusual. There's about one eruption this size every single year.
nice report! at Summit Rock (which is also the highest natural point of Central Park) the outcrop was excavated to make room for the Central Park West avenue, and now at the intersection with 83rd street there's a huge, vertical and crumbling wall. Coincidentally very close to the Natural History museum. I took a piece of Manhattan Schist there in 2017 and brought back to Italy
The only reasons I’d ever go to NYC: natural history museum, NY botanic garden, the public library, and Central Park, with this being the key feature of the park I’d like to see.
Thank you for a great video 😊
Fascinating. One of my favorite places to do a photo walk. Does anyone know of any geologic tours of Central Pk?
New York has many geologic features, Long Island and the Finger Lacks around Syracuse are all Glacier sculpted.
Loved this!
I used to live just Northwest of the city. Look into Harriman State Park, and the surrounding area. That's where I grew up. Tons of iron mines.
Cool , now if your on the east coast will you get to Stone Mountain down south?
Shawn, I presume that the glacial striations on all the outcrop examples lineup or are parallel to each other? It would be cool to see a lidar map of the area looking at the outcrops. Any perpendicular striation oddities from other advances? Thanks for the tour.
I grew up across the Hudson in Rockland County NY. My first climbing was in Harriman park and the Palisades cliffs. Then the Gunks. My mom lives right next to the Ramapo fault. Everywhere are glacier polished striated bed rock and erratic boulders. I had always heard there’s a Palisades cliffs ( crude basalt columns) connection to Africa.
Did you visit Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University while you were in NYC? Worked there for decades.
That was interesting. ❤✌️👍
Thx Prof ✌🏻
In your exploration of the geology of Central Park did you come across any local chalk deposition sites dating from the Anthropocene? I have observed that these chalk deposits tend to violate the geologic principle that deposition occurs in horizontal layers in that they are usually found on nearly vertical surfaces.
Ha! Climbing chalk, eh?
@@shawnwillsey I had bouldering in mind.
Are you going to check out the epicenter of the recent quake while in the area?
I was curious about the two major cracks (perpendicular to the layering in the schist) which were clearly visible in the second schist outcrop (the one with the large erratic boulder - see [7:48]). In fact, I had initially thought that this was maybe what had caught your eye and drawn you to this outcrop. Any idea about the source of those cracks? My first guess was a geological/tectonic fault but my mental image of a fault is something of a more significant scale. Perhaps they are simple fractures during glaciation?
Yes, LI & several other islands are part of the terminal moraine(s).
I wonder! If you travel north you might come across the place the boulder may have originated from.😊
What clues are there to the glacial flow direction?
While in NYC, you should do a walking tour of minerals in the facades of buildings.
Are there lots of erratics at your particular location?
I have heard different opinions as to how deep the ice was over Manhattan at its peak thickness. What say you and what is the basis for this estimate?
Wonders never stop appearing where-ever you go.
While this is an engineering observation, keep in mind that Manhattan Schist is not just a tourist attraction in Central Park. It is also the foundation of Manhattan's high rise architecture.
"NEW YORK CITY "Tank you ALL
Hi Shawn interesting rocks with exposed mica schist, those are also the rocks which allow the tall skyscrapers to be built there on hard rock foundations to.
That said I'm going to call out that this isn't really a "pocket of nature" in a literal sense as while there are trees it looks to basically one giant "lawnscape", though some of that could in principal be animal maintained by larger grazers or huge amounts of deer over browsing if any deer remain in Central Park but as far as I am aware none of that is present in central park, and I doubt that could fully explain the uniformly denude landscapes I've seen there. Either way like any other "lawn like" environment it is a wholly artificial ecological desert wasteland environment which can only be maintained by regular heavy disturbance from gas guzzling machinery and fossil fuel derived chemical fertilizers and pesticides by an industry which views plants as disposable decorations rather than living things and thus utterly neglects and tramples the soil into oblivion for the pointless task of murdering anything that isn't lawn monoculture wasteland. That means there isn't an intact soil profile and leaf removal cuts the available resources from primary production of a temperate forest by upwards of 80%. And lets not forget that ground compactification turns what little soil remains into impermeable layers which in combination with the rocks and city hardscapes means there is no where for water to go but to run off.
In summary Central Park at least the areas I've seen can only be called "nature" in the sense that it isn't wall to wall towering skyscrapers and pedestrian deathtrap streets. I feel this is an important point to bring up because beyond the common sense solution of cutting the stupid unnecessary use of hydrocarbons for nonproductive tasks like mowing, one of the easiest ways we can really start to drawdown carbon through land use beyond cutting fossil fuels is to stop destroying the soil which forms the basis for life on land.
I can understand the want for pasture height land where people can run around and play but do we really need so much of this artificial death scape which can only persist because we spend billions of dollars to stomp down natural rejuvenation of landscapes with our heavy carbon footprints, for no reason other than the propaganda of what landscapes should look like funded directly by the fossil fuel industry and its subsidiaries. Its one industry which if ended would make the world a better place for everyone in terms of quality of life, i.e. the workers doing it are exposed to toxic high doses of chemicals and bad air quality pollutants for little to no pay all to maintain a toxic wasteland so we can run around and give our dogs and kids cancer. Life not lawns!
Hi. Those wide areas of bare rock are common in my home area. Glaciated (heavily scored) rock never gained a topsoil due (??) to coastal weather, strong persistent westerly wind off the Atlantic and high rainfall keep it pristine bare. Valley bottoms collect sediment and support scrub woodland (mixed with tormented sessile oak) and bog myrtle. Grazing is minimal. The features have nothing to do with lawn culture as there is only a minute human footprint. If you are interested check out glacial landscapes of Snowdonia (Parc Eryri) North Wales - UK.
Assuming that the rocks in NYC central park were there already and not transported from elsewhere?
Most of what he was looking at is bedrock, so yes, it's native. It's the same rock you find underlying most of Manhattan.
I'm guessing that erratic comes from the Palisades sill, which runs north-south just west of Manhattan for a considerable distance in both directions. Its rock was quarried for a lot of purposes back in the day, so I can't swear that none of it wound up in Central Park deliberately. I don't know why anybody would leave such a large chunk of it on top of a random outcrop, though, so that's probably natural too. If not from the Palisades sill then somewhere else I don't know about.
The actual landscape of the park is mostly not natural, bedrock aside. A large amount of earth-moving involved to turn it into what it is now. Took decades to fully construct. It's a cool place.
Professor talks about orogenous zones and other erratic topics.
😳
That schist is borderline gneiss or migmatite, especially with near-melt zones.
Watch your language
@@daleolson3506 You're lucky I didn't mention augen gneiss!
@@StereoSpace that’s it where’s the soap
I can't really tell, is this Schist green?
The most famous rock in the park is Umpire Rock, aka Rat Rock, which actually has climbers come to scale its 15 foot face.
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First!
You didn’t get robbed?knifed.or accosted in the park.
6 tons of granite and….micaceous schist! 🪨
Last outcrop: ??migmatite. Thank you!! Never liked big cities, but now there is something to look out for!