Hike, bike, or kayak at Palisades Interstate Park, a rare goldmine of geologic history that’s a stone’s throw from midtown Manhattan
As North America began to tear itself away from North Africa, lava intruding into the sedimentary rock under the Newark Basin formed the Palisade Sill, a kind of container of magma that slowly cooled, altering the size and makeup of the rock. Kinney uses the analogy of a doughnut being injected with jelly, as he points out the clear contact point that can be seen along the base of the cliffs, where blocky lake rock gives way to the sill’s massive trunk-like basalt.
Today, his interests have expanded into how the shifting orbital patterns of our planet might have contributed to climate-influenced mass extinction events. His research is centered on this overlooked corner of the world. “We have cores here where 25 meters of rock corresponds to a 20,000-year lake cycle,” Olsen says. “So a human lifetime can actually be seen in a few centimeters of rock.”
The Palisades was a source of rock for use in roads and railways, both of which were spreading across New Jersey and New York at a rapid clip at the end of the 19th century. To obtain the rock, miners would blast the cliffs with dynamite, collecting the broken-up boulders left behind when the smoke cleared.
“A lot of people look at open space as unused land,” says Carol Ash, who was the PIPC’s executive director from 1999 to 2006 and is now the chairperson of the nonprofit
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