The Palisades
Uh Oh — it’s time to talk about The Palisades. If you don’t know, now you know. We’re only talking about one of the coolest natural formations in the lower NY area, but for those unacquainted, this is actually one of the coolest geologic features out there. New York really has some excellent geologic history, and we’re here to tell you a little about it and as always, grace you with cool pictures.
Did you know: Long Island was formed by glaciers? (Now you’re hooked)
Starting is the view from Tallman Mountain State Park — on the Palisades side. What the Palisades are is the series of cliffs running up the Hudson on the Jersey side for the initial trip inland up the river. The NY side has the city, and is relatively flat, but these massive cliffs dominate across the way, making it hard to build a city of such incredible magnitude, explaining Fort Lee. I’m sure there were also strategic advantages to the Manhattan side but we’ll talk about that later (never.)
These incredible cliff formations were formed by rising magma, pushing up the Earth’s crust. The crust pulled apart under all the pressure, and the magma came up, creating these cliffs. I, personally, struggle to picture this all in my head but it seems plausible. Apparently, something about the magma having the same density as the surrounding rock caused it to form a sheet, called a sill, which is the science name for these cliffs. Something too, for my readers — what makes the difference between magma and lava?
Magma is below ground, lava is above ground. Too easy, you jabronis.
Here we can see, from the Hudson Side, specifically somewhere in Mount Vernon, a profile of the sill. It’s tall. It’s also old enough at this point that there’s a fully developed forest on top of it, and at the base. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest erosion as well as possible sediment deposition by the Hudson formed that little base at the bottom, but I will not look it up to confirm or deny it. Something quite cool about these rocks is they cool (different meaning this time) into a certain formation, almost like a bunch of cylinders, just not quite round. It’s a characteristic of quickly cooled igneous rocks, which characterizes these.
For reference, the 3 kinds of rocks are igneous, aka created by cooled lava/magma, sedimentary, created by depositing of smaller rocks and minerals, or metamorphic, smushed into a giant panini press under the Earth. Diamonds are metamorphic.
Nowadays, the lava has cooled. NY has not seen geologic effects like that for quite a long time. We are now known for the city primarily. But there is still excellent nature, and a lot to see if you end up that direction. To the right is Tallman Mountain on the other side of the Tappan Zee Bridge, and of course NYC is in the distance. The skyscrapers may be taller than the sill. It’s taken us a long time, but we can now build bigger buildings than certain small outbursts of flaming rock. But for a long time to come, humans will enjoy that great view from both the bottom and top of these bad boys, even as we go about our day to day lives. Incredible to think of the ways in which the routine world around us formed. Henry Hudson must have been bugging when he first sailed up this way.
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