Beginnings

 Jessup Field is a large patch of grass on the campus of Cornell University.  It is an athletic field, but has no markings for any specific game.  This blog is a blog but with no specific purpose. In some ways it is like Jessup Field.  Ordered but not confined to a single game.

I live near Ithaca, New York which is the home of Cornell University and Ithaca College.  It is a place of great natural beauty but much of it is repetitive: trees, rocks, water, animals. These things are often arranged in magical ways that appear to have been formed by a single artist working with a simple palette. 

Aging Sugar Maple

There are a mixture of trees, evergreen and deciduous.  Maples, spruce, hemlock, beech, pines and nut trees. Ithaca boast lots of flowering trees: crab apples and magnolias.

But the rocks dominate -- they set the architecture for the water and the trees.  They line the beds of the creeks and form the cathedral walls of the the ravines.  They are flat and slightly tilted with fissures that form right angles.  They look like they were mined and placed with a purpose. 

It is all geology.  The basic rocks and formations were formed when the entire area was part of a shallow sea receiving the shells and bones of dying crustaceans and fish and the soils of the eroding peaks of the Adirondack and Catskill Mountains.  That took place in the Devonian period -- 300 million plus years ago and the rocks are mostly shale and sandstone.  Some contain a lot of fossils.  New York even has a state fossil.  It looks a little like a horseshoe crab.  It's Latin name is eurypterus remipes.  Here is a picture of a different fossil -- a glass sponge.  It is very fragile and very rare.  It was found a little south of here and put in a special house on site.

Glass Sponge Fossil

Ithaca Falls on Fall Creek

The most obvious geologic features are the lakes and ravines which are the results of a series of glaciers that last retreated about 40,000 years ago. The glaciers carved out deep, very deep, trenches, left behind lots of rocks and ground up rocks. Some were very finely ground into powder.  Then the trenches were partly filled by subsequent erosion. As they melted the glaciers dumped the rest of the stuff they had gathered into a big plug that blocked the water's exit. Thus we have long and deep lakes and lots of waterfalls.  It's an attraction and a slogan:  Ithaca is Gorges.

Fall Creek Gorge

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The shallow sea left behind salt.  The city of Syracuse was once called the Salt City.  There is a salt mine near Ithaca.  The only train that still serves Ithaca comes every day to load up with car after car of salt from the salt mine.  I have been told that the mine is underneath the lake.  I sometimes worry that a hole will form in the bottom of the lake and all the water will rush into the mine.

Cayuga Lake, Ithaca New York

I moved to Ithaca from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  I wanted to leave Chapel Hill because I felt that the rapid development of that area was destroying what I loved about it.  I believed I could come to Ithaca and would not care what happened here.  Not much happens here by way of development except that the colleges are in a state of constant construction and a lot of box stores have sprung up in the retail areas.  But I do care about what happens here, more than I ever thought I would. I just care on a micro-scale -- I care about each tree and each bush.