This course reviews plate tectonics and then the fundamentals of stratigraphy. Both are then combined to study the orogenic (mountain building) and basin evolution of New England and New York. The course culminates in two extended field trips to foreland basin deposits of western Vermont and eastern New York.
The field trips are excellent opportunities to examine extensive vertical sections of rock that, with a little work, tell students about the quiet time before mountain building began, the foundering of the crust as mountains began to grow through folding and west-directed thrust faulting, the development of a large basin at the flank of the new mountains, and finally the filling of that basin with debris shed from the mountains.
More to come here… (the rest of the Taconic and Acadian in fact!)