Saturday, January 7, 2017

Volcanoes in Berks County, Pennsylvania

We are "Cop Rock" we are Screech
We are Z. Cavaricci
We are laser removed
Tasmanian devil tattoos

You are the heart dotting "i"
In the word "apologize"
Scribbled drunk on a postcard
Sent from somewhere volcanoes are

- Bloodhound Gang, "Pennsylvania"
The geology of Pennsylvania is fascinating and is undeservedly neglected in favor of the West's more striking volcanoes and active faults. A lot has happened in PA, but the land is old so it's worn-down so it's not as dramatic. And unlike the West there's plenty of water, so there are trees covering everything, which makes the geology even less obvious. For example, the volcanoes of Berks County.

Yes, you read that right. I would've expected Berks County (and all of PA for that matter) to be limited to sandstone, some limestone, maybe some granite. But read the rocks in some of the hills of southern Berks, and you reveal the capricious fire and violence of the planet and the universe. A year or so ago, I was looking at topographical maps of Berks, and this formation in Exeter Township jumped out at me. Here are some screenshots of topo maps to give you context (I'm sure there's a better way to display this but I haven't found it; if you know how, please leave a comment. Unless otherwise noted maps are from Google.)







(If you want to zoom in and play around click here.)

(There are also volcanoes, in fact more recent cenozoic ones, in Virginia - see this YouTube video.)

Comparing the bottom map to the one showing-the ridge-and-valley Appalachians at the top, can you appreciate how unlike the hills in the northern part of the county are, compared to the formation in the bottom map? Isolated, wedge-shaped, and surrounded by concentric rings of hills. Hills in Berks County, as in most of central and eastern PA, tend to be long, rounded off ridges (or at least pieces of rounded off ridges, sometimes dissected by old rivers), separated by flat valleys, like you can see on the top map there. Why is this? The Appalachians are old mountains formed during the Alleghanian Orogeny, a mountain building event that began over three hundred million years ago, well before the dinosaurs and the Atlantic Ocean, when North Africa ground against North America. This means, among other things, that part of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco and Algeria used to be continuous with the Appalachians. (As a result of my trip several months after this post to Morocco, I am able to present some Pennsylvania Appalachian and Morocco Atlas rock samples side by side, long lost cousins united at last!) At one point, these mountains were probably the highest mountains on Earth, like the modern Himalayas, which should reinforce your impression of their age.


Above, the world 350 million years ago when the Appalachians began forming; Pennsylvania is somewhere in the red circle. Below, the world 200 million years ago when these weird hills appeared in Berks. From geologyclass.com and scotese.com respectively.



The individual ridges today still run for several states in length; as you can see in the first map above, the more southern and central Appalachians trend north, then turn eastward in central Pennsylvania. The most easterly/southerly ridge (i.e., the most seaward of these ridges) sort of peters out just west of the Susquehanna. In practical terms, that means that Appalachian Trail hikers (who have been following that ridge since Virginia all the way to Halfway Springs in Michaux State Forest just east of Shippensburg) have to cross from the now dying ridge through a flat valley of small farms and towns to Dillsburg, and then attain what Berks Countians think of as the Blue Ridge - the last ridge cut by the Susquehanna (one of the oldest rivers on Earth) just above Harrisburg (which is why they put the state capital there) and which is again cut by the Schuylkill River as it emerges into Berks at Hamburg.

The most seaward ridge doesn't completely die though - it continues as a set of lower, worn-down hills like the ones around Mt. Gretna, and South Mountain in western Berks, and finally Mt. Penn and Neversink which continue as the uranium- and therefore (practical point!) radon-laden Reading Prong all the way to Connecticut. Hike up to the top of the newly-added piece of Pennsylvania's State forests, Gibraltar Hill (near the border between Cumru, Exeter and Robeson Townships in Berks County) and the unexpected view it affords may convince you that these mountains were once much higher.



Is that hill from an asteroid-caused tsunami? Many reasons against this, not least of which that impact was just too far south and there would be more and more obvious such remains closer, like in Virginia. Image from Slashgear.


So now you have a better idea why someone might be offended by the very existence of this bizarre isolated wedge-shaped half-cone in Exeter Township, Pennsylvania. Hills in PA are not supposed to be sharp wedges that change direction like the ones you see above, with little concentric ridges around them. And yet, to paraphrase Galileo, there it was. The best I could come up with is that these are a result of a tsunami. What? Tsunamis often leave behind wedge-shaped formations like this; and there was in fact a massive mid-Atlantic tsunami about 35 million years ago, that actually made it over the first (then even higher) Appalachian ridge, when a large meteor smashed into what is now the southern tip of the Delmarva Peninsula. (Practical point here: the ground is still sinking in Hampton Roads along the southeastern Virginia Coast, about 6 inches a century.) But really, that was hand-waving, and I didn't give any more thought to how I would test my theory. (If you can test your theory, better to test it and find out you were wrong but have a true answer, than let it dangle in uncertainty.)

When later I was looking at topo maps of PA again, I noticed this formation, around Green Lane Reservoir in northern Montgomery County, 25 miles from the first strange hill. It doesn't look like a tsunami remnant at all. But it is suspiciously circular, which makes it look much like something else. (Note: as of 2019 I have been to Green Lane Reservoir. While a perfectly nice body of water with charming villages around it, on the ground, the hills are not obviously crater-like - so I forgive upper Montgomery County residents for not making it a tourist attraction.)


Above: forested hills on the circular ridge around Green Lane Reservoir, northern Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Below: Diamondhead crater, Honolulu in background, from Hawaii Division of State Parks.



At this point I decided it was getting ridiculous, and I better just look at a soil map. Sure enough, those hills are made of igneous (volcanic) rock. Red is igneous. (When I looked at this map I actually pounded my desk and shouted "I knew it!" So I'm a geek, so sue me.) Arrows point to the Jacksonwald Hill and the one around Green Lane Reservoir. Map is from Rocks and Minerals of Pennsylvania, published by the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.






#1 is the weird hill I first noticed, hereafter called by its proper name, the Jacksonwald Outlier. #2 is the rim around Green Lane Reservoir (which may not actually reveal the shape of an actual crater, but is volcanic nonetheless.) #3 is Monocacy Hill, which I stumbled on while I was running the whole Schuylkill River Trail in Berks (it's a nice hike, you should check it out). Penn State has a map of Berks County specifically, where Gibraltar Hill is also marked as igneous. While it may seem from this list that every hill in these parts is volcanic, as soon as you get north of Reading, that's the last igneous rock you see, and the mountains become well-behaved Appalachians. To get hyperlocal for Cumru Township, there's also an arc of igneous rock running from about Fritz Island, through Nolde Forest and Gouglersville to Fritztown. The rock found on these hills is diabase, which is an igneous rock less macroscopically heterogeneous than gabbro, but more heterogeneous than basalt. Image of diabase below from Sand Atlas.


So I'm not the first person to figure out that there's something strange about those hills and that they're actually volcanic, but once you learn this, you immediately find out all kinds of interesting geological history of southeast Pennsylvania. The Jacksonwald and peri-Green Lane Reservoir formations are both part of an arc of scattered igneous rock ridges that extend to Newark, New Jersey, called the Wachtung Outliers.

Such was my obsession that when I was back in Berks for the holidays, I went to the Jacksonwald Outlier - although you really can't appreciate the strangeness of the shape while you're standing on it, even inside the back of the wedge, which in California we would call a box canyon if we were feeling generous (but again, Pennsylvania isn't supposed to have box canyons). I collected some samples from near the top, mostly eroded, loose rocks on the north half of Fabers Road, some of which I hammered off from a much bigger stone, to avoid embarrassing discussions with TSA as I flew back to the West Coast. (Thanks to Arch for loaning the hammer for this and Ringing Hill.) To my inexpert eye, these look like diabase as opposed to granite or some sedimentary stone.





Completely by accident, during this same visit I accidentally ended up on top of two other igneous intrusions on this visit - the first was Ringing Hill in Pottstown, which features diabase ringing rocks like the more famous ones in Bucks County, and I went there with a hammer to hear for myself. On the most zoomed-in rock type map above, you can see the red spur of igneous rock that extends southeast along the Perkiomen from the loop around Green Lane Reservoir, then west and northwest to the Berks County line, and passes the towns just north of Pottstown and north of the Schuylkill (Video below, but the audio doesn't do it justice. This phenomenon occurs when igneous rocks get glaciated for a while but we really don't understand why from a materials science standpoint.)



Below, Youtuber NJRE has a better video from the Upper Black Eddy Ringing Rocks field near the Delaware River, in Bucks County.



I already mentioned the second Pennsylvania volcano I accidentally visited, another newly-preserved park, Monocacy Hill. (Thank you for your commitment and hard work, Pennsylvania and Berks County conservationists!) When I got to the top, I noticed that the exposed rock looked exactly the same as what I found on the Jacksonwald Outlier - and indeed it's also diabase. And again, Monocacy Hill is another free-standing near-conical hill not part of an Appalachian Ridge. (When I found the diabase there in another free-standing, oddly-shaped hill, I thought to myself, "well duh.")


Above, diabase at the summit of Monocacy Hill. Below, Lake Manicouagan in Quebec.



So WHY is there volcanic rock in Southern Berks and northern Montgomery Counties? ("Trap rock", as geologists sometimes call it - visible on this nifty geological map of Pennsylvania.) Because there were a series of large eruptions two hundred million years ago, at the tail end of the Triassic (the first of three dinosaur ages that made up the Mesozoic). Two interesting things here involving the history of life on Earth: there was a mass extinction at the end of the Triassic. The jury is still out on the cause, but these volcanoes are the leading culprit. The competing suspect is the Manicouagan impactor 213 million years ago, another asteroid impact that produced was is now Manicouagan Reservoir in Quebec, and we know it affected far-flung locations because you can find microscopic spherules in contemporary strata in both New York and England (spherules are produced when a mist of molten rock is in free fall for significant time - yikes.)

But again, an asteroid impact cannot be the answer, because the timing is wrong - there's a thirteen million year gap. On the other hand, we're fairly sure that in other areas of the world, continent-wide volcanism has caused extinctions before, as in the Deccan or Siberian Traps in Asia, which would have made the Yellowstone supervolcano eruption look like a fourth-of-July sparkler. There have even been dinosaur footprints found in rocks of this age in the Passaic formation around this area, which is kind of cool. [Added later: there are dinosaur footprints from just before the Triassic-Jurassic boundary on paving stones in Valley Forge.]



Left, rhynchosauroides recreation from roelblog.nl, and right, footprints in Montgomery County. From Spencer G. Lucas and Robert M. Sullivan. Tetrapod footprints from the upper triassic Passaic formation near Graterfor, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. From Harris et al., eds., 2006, The Triassic-Jurassic Terrestrial Transition. New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin.

I used to think dinosaur traces could only be found out west like the ones below, but the very first mostly-intact dinosaur discovered (where the discoverer knew what it was, and didn't think it was dragons or giants or some other nonsense) was actually in the Philly suburb of Haddonfield, New Jersey.




Above: leg bone still embedded in rock wall, Capitol Reef N.P.. Below, dinosaur footprint in Canyonlands N.P. The ones in PA are much harder to spot but experts can still find them.



To summarize, I don't think anything could do better than this excerpt from Peter Martinson's Master's thesis, which he was kind enough to put online in easily-searachable form: "Morgantown Pluton is a layered mafic intrusion which lies at the southern corner of Berks County, PA. It is one part of a much larger complex of 200±4 Ma mafic intrusions (Marzoli et al. 1999; Blackburn et al. 2013) that spreads across the Atlantic coasts of North and South America, North Africa, and Europe, collectively called the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP). In Eastern North America, the CAMP is represented as a network of igneous sheets and dikes that crop out in basins of Triassic-aged sedimentary rock and conglomerate. These Mesozoic basins are roughly parallel to the Atlantic coast, and were formed during the initial rifting of Pangaea and the opening of the Atlantic Ocean. The intrusion of enormous masses of diabase into the basins coincides precisely with the end-Triassic mass turnover of marine fauna identified by Raup & Sepkoski (1982), one of the big five Phanerozoic mass extinctions (Blackburn et al. 2013)." (References are in the paper.)

As to the question of why these erupted then and there, there still isn't a clear answer. As you can see above, they're studied enough to have a name (the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province) and there is much more evidence of these same eruptions in Morocco than in Pennsylvania. Morocco was just a hundred miles away when this happened, and the Atlantic hadn't spread open yet.


Unanswered questions:

1) Are we sure about what caused the Triassic-Jurassic extinction? If it was the CAMP, was it a mantle plume, and more generally, what causes these terrifying mass eruptions?

2) Why do ringing rocks ring, and what is it about being under high pressures and freezing temperatures for long periods that makes igneous rocks into ringing rocks?

3) Should the Reading Prong be considered just the northeastern extension of the Southern Blue Ridge? Is there actually higher radon (secondary to higher uranium content) in the southern Blue Ridge, and if not why not? On this question, radon risk maps are inconsistent, some petering out with South Mountain, others continuing through the central Appalachians (see here and here)


Finally, here is a timeline of events, as of the time of writing, in what is now the Northeast/Mid-atlantic region of the United States. To keep there from being lots of empty space, I'm presenting it in a less-traditional and possibly even more useful logarithmic format.



References and resources:

1. Jacksonwald Syncline, with map

2. Szajna, M.J., and Hartline, B.W., 2003, A new vertebrate footprint localityfrom the Late Triassic Passaic Formation near Birdsboro, Pennsylva-nia, in LeTourneau, P.M., and Olsen, P.E., eds., The great rift valleys ofPangea in eastern North America, vol. 2: sedimentology, stratigraphy,and paleontology: New York, Columbia University Press, p. 264-272. Also see this paper for Triassic-Jurassic age dinosaur footprints found in Douglassville.

3. More information on the Jacksonwald syncline, with pictures of what the rock strata look like "on the ground". Good references if you want to read further.

4. Peter Martinson's Master's Thesis, "On the Magmatic Plumbing and Differentiation of a Shallow Mafic Intrusive System: Morgantown Pluton, its Birdsboro Dike, and the Nearby Jacksonwald Syncline, Newark Basin, Pennsylvania, U.S.A."

5. Billy P. Glass, Bruce M. Simonson. Distal Impact Ejecta Layers: A Record of Large Impacts in Sedimentary Deposits. (See the Olson et al 2002b figure - iridium from Manicougan impact is too early to be responsible for mass extinction, therefore more likely mass volcanism from CAMP.)

6. Spencer G. Lucas & Michael Morales, eds. The Nonmarine Triassic: Bulletin 3. (See p. 440, which is in agreement that the Triassic-Jurassic extinction boundary is much closer to the time of CAMP activity.)

32 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Unknown said...

Such a great article. Just a bit north of the ancient volcanic remnants is the Ramapo earthquake fault which runs through my little tractor barn studio, and along the creek just off of 662 and the corner of 562. Most every building here on this old Swedish farm has been altered by large quakes during the 1700 and 1800's, and lesser quakes and earth distortion of recent years.
On one side of the fault the trees are different than the other the other side. Up the hill some forty yards is waterfall conglomerate in what I belive is a Trissic revine lifted by the fault. On this side is limestone and ruble as we sit lower here than the floor of the Oley Valley.
Strange place indeed.
This would be a great place to study eastcoast geology.
-JD

Michael Caton said...

Joseph, I have to confess I'm a total geology amateur so what little I know, I learned in order to understand what I was looking at these particular formations. I will be eager to look up most of what you're talking about here. The most surprising thing you mention is that there are buildings old enough to be altered by cumulative seismic activity. But, as you say, it shows that Berks really is geologically interesting, even if it's not as un-subtle as some of what we see out West. Thanks for the comment!

Thad Zajdowicz, MD, MPH said...

Great article! I was born in Reading and spent lots of time in Jacksonwald -- never imagining what the nearby geology held. Thanks for posting.

Michael Caton said...

Met neither Thad. Berks and PA are more interesting than many give credit for!

Unknown said...

so a friend of mine actually knows a lady who works for the government and they come and check on the volcano in Exeter every 6 months because it's an active volacano. Which is crazy

Michael Caton said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Michael Caton said...

Seriously? After 200M years it seems pretty quiet. On the known active volcanoes in the west, they just put seismic sensors which tell you what you need to know.

Unknown said...

My name is Benedict J. Straka, I live at 816 Maple Street Berlin PA. 15530, I can be reached a 814 267 4201. I have been doing research for a book about the origin of coal here in PA. I have been looking for some research about Tsunamis, Meteroite Impacts and now have read about
an extinct volcano in the eastern part of the Appalachian trench, you have my intense attention. It is information like you uncovered that can influence my education of how this
anchient volcano could have influenced the coal seams. In particular I am interested in the time frame that this volcano was active. I have been searching for a cause that created the
binder in some of the early seams of coal both on the eastern side of the Appalachian trench
and the western side. Especially in the Pittsburgh seam. Where this binder is in the middle
of the coal seam and consists of slate dirt and other elements. I would like to copy your
obervations, findings and remarks. I think I can learn a lot from then, and if I should choose to use some of your data I would ask you for specific approval to use same. Thank You. unclebenny7689olds@gmail.com

Michael Caton said...

Thanks for your interest. I'll contact you off-line. I'm no expert so if you want an answer more likely to be correct, you should contact some of the people in the bibliography. But I would assume that the volcanoes were active 200 million years ago during the Triassic-Jurassic boundary. The coal is from the Carboniferous which predates that.

Robert said...

You might look up Grand Solar Minimum...which commenced in 2012. As a result, the planet is in a state of volcanic and seismic convulsion. There are reports of smokey sulfurous odors emanating in Deleware County, PA, of unknown origin. . It has been reported that some of the recent fires in CA were set by volcanic fumaroles. A vast magma chamber has recently been discovered under the northeastern seaboard, and it is moving upwards. Check out Comyns Beaumont and his research that connects meteoric impacts with volcanoes. The collective human consciousness has yet to rise to the reality of the occasion. One age is ending and another is on its way.

Michael Caton said...

Hmmm, I'm not aware of a connection between solar cycles and geology. Aa for California fires, Not to put too fine a point on it, I probably would have heard about that since I live in Sonoma County CA about 8 miles from where the edge of the Kincade fire was. We have more recently extinct, more obvious volcanoes here, 2 of which I see on my daily commute, but neither of them has shown any activity.

Dave said...

OK so I am looking at a circular lake of about 92 acres surrounded by woods at the top of a hill which basically starts seven miles away down a windy mountain road named Wooddale. Analomink is the name of a tiny village some three miles NW of East Stroudsburg in the Pocono Mountains. There at the bottom is an average stream, and the circular lake, on top of a hill of who knows... a few hundred feet above Analomink... made me wonder if indeed the mountain lake Monroe Lake which I stare at out of my living room window is in fact the crater lake filled by mountain springs of a now extinct volcano... whose last eruption was what... a couple hundred million years ago? Dream on. Fantasy thinking... but really?

Michael Caton said...

Hi Dave, sorry for the long delay in reply. Keep in mind I'm an amateur geologist but my fairly confident opinion is that you're looking at a post-glacial lake. I think I was a bit overexcited thinking that the vein of igneous rock around Green Lane Reservoir was actually revealing the shape of the volcano. After 200 million years things move around a bit. But the glaciers were much more recent, ie humans settled North America as the last ones receded. PA was partly but not fully glaciated, and the glaciers were much more prevalent in the Poconos and further west on the Allegheny Plateau. Berks was not glaciated. Post-glacial areas are covered with circular ponds, and you can actually see this if you zoom out a bit and notice how the distribution of lakes and their shape changes dramatically as you move south from your location. New York State is almost entirely covered with them as is Ontario. Small waterfalls are often much more common in post-glacial areas because the ground is still de-compressing from the weight of all the ice, and some parts rise faster than others, and you get small streams with smallish waterfalls. (Post-glacial rebound is fast enough that home-builders in Ontario actually have to take it into account - on the order of an inch per century. Older homes will be affected but this if the ground is rising on one side faster than the other!) In Berks there are few if any waterfalls, but when I go on Reddit in r/PAWilds and someone posts pictures of the waterfall they just hiked to, almost invariably it's in the Poconos or the Allegheny Plateau. You can see the same types of ponds (kettle ponds) in Scandinavia and northern Europe. If you pick a random area of tundra in Siberia or Alaska north of the Brooks you can see those same lakes, except it's still flat enough and not covered with forest that they're obvious. All that said, I checked out photos of Lake Monroe and that's a good-looking lake you got there!

Anonymous said...

I've said for years that Monocacy Hill looked like it was once a volcano, albeit probably a small and very non spectacular one. There are a few odd rock formations in the Exeter Twp. area. In Reiffton there are some similar rock outcroppings close to the Senior High School. And some odd rock formations along 422 near the Boscov's Distribution center. Not a geologist but they don't look like limestone but more igneous. There's a waterhole on Monocacy by the trail with a sandstone/shale layering. I think Pa WAS completely under ice in a previous ice age, the snow ball effect one maybe 100,000 years ago. I have a rock sample from Kinzua in NW Pa I took as a souvenir from where they cut the road out. Just a small " rock" thats made of compressed and very fine pebbles and silt from the erosion and pressure of the glacier.

Michael Caton said...

Monocacy Hill was probably quite a bit bigger 200 M years ago! If you look at the bedrock map of Berks, you probably are indeed seeing some igneous outcroppings. There's also a band that runs through Cumru Township from around Fritz Island over to Mohnton.

Joan Weidner-Adams said...

I live off Gibraltar Road on the Exeter Twp side of the Schuylkill. Being a resident of Exeter for 60 years, I have often wondered just HOW these tortured hills developed. One clue was upon inspection of the "all sorts" conglomerate rocks, which lay under the soils from 422 at the mall to where I live and beyond. This rock forms a "carpet" of clay matrix containing myriads of "stones" obviously formed of glacial action upon larger rocks. But these larger rocks are NOT included in the matrix. There are glacial striations upon many of the various stones. When the newer mall went in, the "carpet" under the whole of the mall, had to be "jack-hammered", to break up and breakthrough this extremely hard matrix.
More years went by until I viewed a YouTube vid by Antonio Zamora. He was postulating on the formation of the Carolina Bays in South Carolina, viewed by Lidar. Taking the hundreds of elliptical formations in the soil, all orientated in the same direction, he tracked backwards to a point in the Great Lakes and also in Canada. Similarly, the Nebraska flats could be traced back to the same places. Further postulations about the fact that the Laurentine Ice Sheet was covering the extreme Northeastern part of the United States(in North America), and into Canada, something may have happened here that we are missing. Yes, something was missing. A theory was set forward that a meteor/asteroid storm could have hit the ice sheet covering the Great Lakes and in that maelstrom, left no crater/craters.
Mr Zamora put a lot of work into this theory but it paid off. 12,800 to 12,900 years ago a storm of asteroids bombarded the glaciers and threw ice boulders as far as South Carolina and Nebraska. Well then, just what happened to Reading and Berks? We were right in the thick of things, but what we got was glacial CALVING of not only huge mountains of splintered ice, but also pointed icebergs, pointed on the side away from the impact. I'm working on the formation possibilities of the valley of 422 and its bypass. 724 and into Robeson Twp and into Birdsboro. More later. I'll check back!
Joan Weidner-Adams

David Fisherowski said...

Should investigate Canon Hill right outside of Boyertown Pa. It's a sill that had pools of magnetite settle along it's sides and we're mined for the iron during colonial times. It dates about the same time as Morgantown, Ringing Rocks, Saint Peter's Village and Devil's Den at Gettysburg.

Michael Caton said...

Thank you David, I will check it out.

Robert said...

There are those in positions of power and authority who are well aware that an Epic-Grand Solar Minimum commenced in 2012, precisely as predicted by the Mayan Calendar. Within the next 10 years major seismic and volcanic events in diverse locations followed by glaciation will have culled the vast majority of life on this planet, the survivors of which will be forced to live within 25~ degrees on either side of the equator as portended in the ancient Amazonian prophecy of the Eagle and the Condor. To fully comprehend current events, one would do well to contemplate what those in positions of power and authority are doing in anticipation of what is essentially a shifting of the ages...from a lower to a higher level of consciousness. The earth has entered into a period of great upheaval and renewal. The Cosmic Clock struck 2012 and the peal of the chimes are unmistakable as they reverberate throughout the earth and within its inhabitants in their annunciation of a better age to come.

Unknown said...

I have discovered fossils (shells) and volcanic rock (pumicite) here in Carbon County.

Unknown said...

*pumice

Michael Caton said...

I've heard of the recent N American asteroid hypothesis but I don't think Berks was glaciated at that time.

Michael Caton said...

Robert, my apologies for the delay in my response. I don't think there is any evidence for what you're saying, and my confidence in that statement is such that I'm willing to make a public bet with you about it. It doesn't have to be monetary (though I'm not against that) but I don't want to give you an out by saying that you're against gambling. So - if you actually believe what you're saying here, then let's operationalize what we're talking about and agree on the stakes in a public forum. Interested?

Michael Caton said...

Not surprised! I always wanted to see the Coral Caverns in South entral PA but it's never open when I'm in the state.

Robert said...

Michael, you can bet your life what I have diligently been researching for two decades is not only based on solid evidence, but is occurring right now before your very eyes. Your research absolutely comports with my research and that of many others. If you thoroughly research the subject of Grand Solar Minimums (GSM) you will see every element taking place currently. When you can confirm you have looked into the GSM and have concluded there is no evidence thereof, then I can only conclude a blindness has come over you, as it has for so many others who cannot see the forest for the trees. A monetary bet has already become a casualty of the GSM as those in power move furtively and covertly to manage the onset of GLACIATION which is already wreaking havoc on this planet. You might also look into the book written by Chan Thomas, "The Adam & Eve Story" which was classified by the CIA and then released after heavy redaction. Volcanism is the result of a cold fusion reaction as evidenced by the presence of tritium in the gases in volcanic eruptions. Deuterium (heavy water) at depth intrudes into the deep fissures where a high concentration of platinum and palladium exist which is then initiated by an electrical discharge (subterranean lightning) which melts the rock into incandescence.

As an aside, I had a dream only last night of a huge caldera in the vicinity of Baltimore, MD, which was lined with a soft, brown rocky formation. Not coincidentally, the Baltimore Canyon just off the coast undoubtedly is the means by which deuterium existing at depth in sea water, intrudes into the rock formations below to begin the process of volcanism.

Money will have no meaning within the next 10 years.

Robert said...

Michael, this might aid you in your research into volcanic activity in the eastern seaboard area.
Deep sea trenches (Baltimore Canyon, e.g.) are associated with volcanoes. The Japanese have a tradition that a volcano is a dragon whose tail lies deep within the earth and its fire breathing mouth the cone. There have been numerous reports of deep sea dwelling fish in such trenches that have been disturbed by some force that causes them to surface. When this happens, according to the tradition, volcanic eruptions are imminent.

http://geologycafe.com/nyc/mesozoic/baltimorecanyon.htm

Michael Caton said...

Robert, I'm sorry to say that now that you have figured this out, the Illuminati will be coming to your house to silence you with chemtrail 5g flat Earth vaccines. You were warned!

An Englightened and Inspired Anonymous writer said...

Hey, I've got a geological inquiry? Does west pa have some similar geological structures like that too? Some strange things been occurring geo wise out here and I've been noticing them and recognizing them from my research into world geo events and geo history. Could the Atlantic Ocean be subducting more under usa at a faster rate than before?! And is it possible to have a mt Peaktu china current with pacific ocean plates like senerio happening here on the east coast then with the Atlantic?!?

Michael Caton said...

As far as I understand, there is not a similar situation as with the Chinese volcano. If that was going to happen anywhere in the US it would be west of the Rockies. Lots of accreted terranes there, as opposed to the east coast, which us a passive margin - the coast is not a fault line, but rather just where the plate goes below sea level (hence why the west coast has mountains right at the coast, but the east coast near the water is pretty flat. So no subduction on the east coast of North America, and little opportunity for a piece of crust or mantle to have been deposited there.

Banana&Marty said...

Any thought as to what created the hills of Earl Township Berks County? As we drove north on 662 through the oley valley my kids asked me what made them. (They ask all sorts of ridiculous questions like I’m encyclopedia brown). To get them to shut up I said volcanoes. Now my three year old is terrified. It is such a beautiful area however. We live at the base of a very steep but short hill.

Michael Caton said...

Looking at soil and bedrock maps of the county, it's limestone. So, not.volcanoes. Even if they were volcanoes, you can tell them the ones in Berks County have heen dead since before T rex walked the Earth - even older than their parents. :)