The Rise and Fall of the Taconic Mountains
A Geological History of Eastern New York
by Donald W. Fisher, NYS Paleontologist Emeritus
with Stephen L. Nightingale
foreword by Dr. Robert Fakundiny, NYS Geologist Emeritus
This is a chronicle of dramatic, continual, ongoing change. Over vast stretches of geologic time—as the Earth boiled and cooled, volcanoes erupted, earthquakes rocked the land, and continents crushed together—mountains rose and fell, seas and lakes filled and drained, a mile-high sheet of ice advanced and receded. The highest peaks in the Taconics today are less than 4000 feet high, but millions of years ago they towered to 14,000 feet while the Catskills lay under tropical seas. New York State’s Paleontologist Emeritus traces the geologic history of eastern New York, western Massachusetts, and western Vermont through the rise and fall of New York’s Rockies the draining and sculpting of the Catskill Mountains from an ancient ocean bed, and the rise of the Adirondacks - New York’s youngest mountains created from New York’s oldest rocks.
Included within the book, published for the first time, is a full-color geological map for Columbia County - the heart of the Taconics - the result of over fifty years of fieldwork and study. Also included are essays on pioneering NYS geologists and the NYS Geological Survey, and a section on where to find fossils and how to collect them.
Donald Fisher is the most knowledgeable geologist to have studied the geology of this region to date. … I continue to marvel at his enthusiasm for geology. His passion for the science and his love of helping his students to understand that science give life to his writing as he takes his readers along many memorable paths among the wonders of this region’s geological past.
Dr. Robert H. Fakundiny, New York State Geologist (emeritus)
8 ˝ x 11, 192 ppg, 140 maps, photos & illustrations, full-color fold-out geological map of Columbia County, $24.95, ISBN: 1-883789-52-4,
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