Near the western end of the Massachusetts Turnpike (Rte. I-90) is a sign that tells you that you are, at 1724 feet, located at the highest elevation on the Pike. In fact, it’s the highest I-90 elevation east of South Dakota. We have driven this way many times, but recently we finally pulled over and got out. We didn’t look west, nor east; we looked up – almost five miles into the sky. What on earth were we doing? Well, this location is in the heart of the Berkshires. Curiously that puts it into the heart of another, much older, range of mountains. Geologists call them the Acadians. We have written about them a number of times. Their formation began about 400 million years ago when Africa collided with North America.
The collision of two continents squeezes a lot of rock and forces it into a massive uplift. We call that an orogeny or mountain building event. This one is the Acadian Orogeny and that is a term you should know. Geologists debate just how tall those mountains rose. Some compare them with the Andes and say 15,000 feet. Others compare them with the Himalayas and say 30,000 feet. We like the latter. That gets us back to looking five miles into the sky. That was once all mountain range up there. The boots of some ancient Edmund Hillary would have been five miles high in today’s sky!
But all these mountains have been eroding away for more than 350 million years, and they are now almost gone. Only those 1724 feet are left! Think about all this the next time you are in the Berkshires.
It’s pretty heady stuff, isn’t it? But we geologists are accustomed to thinking such thoughts. For us nothing is forever, great lengths of time corrupt once mighty landscapes. It is, indeed, heady stuff and a wide range of thoughtful people have been pondering similar things for centuries. That includes English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who wrote one of our favorite poems in 1818 – about just this sort of thought. It’s entitled “Ozymandias;” It’s about an ancient king, but it might have been written for the Acadian Mountains just as well. We thought you might enjoy reading it:
I met a traveler from an antique land,
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those Passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair!”
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page at “The Catskill geologist.” Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.”
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