Forums are great places. But meeting fellow modelers in our home areas always seems tough to me.
I'm in Rochester NY. I know Bernd is about 25 miles south of me. If there are other modelers in the Rochester/Finger lakes region of Upstate New York, how about giving us/me, a shout out.
Dave Buchholz
I put my state (NH) and county (Rockingham) in my Modelersforum profile not long after I joined. But I'm not sure how I'd search others' profiles for locations nearby.
Hopefully they will spot this topic and respond to it.
I'm surprised with the number of modelers in the surrounding area that no one else beside me and you ae on the forum. You'd figure with the Rochester Model Railroad club there would be at least a few from there.
You might to need to climb higher on the mountain Dave and yell. ;D
Bernd
You might to need to climb higher on the mountain Dave and yell. (https://modelersforum.com/Smileys/fugue/grin.png)
Huh... My recollection about that part of New York is it's pretty flat... :(
dave
Arthritis.
No more climbing for me.
Quote from: deemery on February 07, 2025, 03:48:44 PMYou might to need to climb higher on the mountain Dave and yell. (https://modelersforum.com/Smileys/fugue/grin.png)
Huh... My recollection about that part of New York is it's pretty flat... :(
dave
It is flat as you get closer to Lake Ontario. Personally I think the lakes name should be changed to Lake New York. After all there is a Lake Michigan.
Anyway, as you go south about 50 miles you get into the Bristol Hills. Where I live there is a geo marker. It shows we are at 1100 feet above sea level and that's not even at the top of the hill yet. I can look into the city.
Bernd
I was driving in the Farmington and Palmyra area the other day in the Northern end of the Finger Lakes Region It's geologically a weird place. During the ice ages, the earth was chewed up and gouged, then spit back out into drumlins and eskers as the glaciers receded towards Canada.
Quote from: Bernd on February 08, 2025, 10:19:10 AMQuote from: deemery on February 07, 2025, 03:48:44 PMYou might to need to climb higher on the mountain Dave and yell. (https://modelersforum.com/Smileys/fugue/grin.png)
Huh... My recollection about that part of New York is it's pretty flat... :(
dave
It is flat as you get closer to Lake Ontario. Personally I think the lakes name should be changed to Lake New York. After all there is a Lake Michigan.
Anyway, as you go south about 50 miles you get into the Bristol Hills. Where I live there is a geo marker. It shows we are at 1100 feet above sea level and that's not even at the top of the hill yet. I can look into the city.
Bernd
Wow, didn't realize the elevation grew so fast. Lake Ontario is at 243'. (I used to have the topo map for Ft Drum, but I got rid of all my old Army maps when I retired...)
dave
Ask you head south via the Genesee River, the are three waterfalls within the Rochester city limits, and three more in Letchworth State Park.
Quote from: Dave Buchholz on February 08, 2025, 10:55:21 AMI was driving in the Farmington and Palmyra area the other day in the Northern end of the Finger Lakes Region It's geologically a weird place. During the ice ages, the earth was chewed up and gouged, then spit back out into drumlins and eskers as the glaciers receded towards Canada.
Eskers are geologically weird. And weird-looking. I first read about them in a Farley Mowat novel, set in the sub-arctic, as a grade school kid. Never thought I'd see one. And then, a decade later, teenaged, I was walking in the deep forest in Québec's Mauricie region, headed to a lake beyond another lake that I'd spotted on the map and that looked like it might be a decent trout-fishing hole. I wasn't following a trail- there wasn't one- navigating by map, compass, and dead reckoning, and I suddenly found myself on what looked for all the world like a snakey elevated hiking path, several feet above grade. Its narrow top was beaten hard as if animals had been using it as a trail for millennia. No trace of a human footprint. I loped along for a few hundred feet and then decided to dig a bit to see if it was rock, because it was just too surreal.
It wasn't rock.
It was a mixture of smooth river-bottom pebbles and bright yellow sand. An upside-down glacial riverbed, just as Mowat had described it.
I realized what I was standing on, and my jaw hit the tops of my sneakers.
You got it. Within glaciers. As they melted, literally streams formed within them. And of course, all the rocks and pebbles went to the bottom sooner of later Given a few eons, thousand years later as they headed downward they formed those snake like mounds of pebbles, many miles long. There are lots of them in the area.
That one's probably the only specimen I'll ever see. Been meaning to go back to it for decades. This time, though, with GPS. And a survival kit. It was a bit of a hike.
This Wikipedia entry drawing eerily, closely depicts what I found myself atop of. It was surrounded by an alarming number of pines, which are thin on the ground in my part of the Canadian Shield. But pines like to grow in sand, in deep, well-drained ground.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esker#/media/File:Esker_(PSF).png
I grew up on a glacial moraine: Newburyport is built on one that was deposited parallel to the last couple of miles of the Merrimack River. The "Mall" uphill of the downtown is a glacial kettlehole. A 200' x 500' ice block broke loose from the glacier and was mostly buried in sand and gravel. Eventually it melted leaving a hole with no outlet 20-30' deep. Newton Rd. in Amesbury MA follows an esker for almost a mile but it's never more than 30 feet above the ponds on either side.
The biggest esker I've seen is about 60' high in places. It carries ME Rt. 9 ("Airline Road") for a number of miles IIRC it's toward the western (Bangor) end of the highway.
There is a certain humor about the fact that model railroaders not only have so many varied artists skills and attention to details that make great creations, and the awareness of how railroads formed America, but also know more about geological features than the average person as well.
You guys are great!
Fifth Dave on the Right.
Pretty much any round pond in New England is likely a kettle. Moraines here range in size from Cape Cod to the series of 2' tall moraines in a field in NH, which a grad student wrote about. Drumlins are pretty common. Another feature in my part of NH (and maybe James', too) are features formed as the glaciers receded and sea levels rose. A couple of the small hills are deltas that formed from glacial run-off into sea levels that were 100' higher than they are now.
The paper I wrote for my first geology course looked at sea levels during glacial retreat. It's a fascinating story. You have to consider not just the water rising in the ocean, but the movement of ground. The ground starts being pushed down by the massive weight of the glaciers. As the glaciers retreat, the land rebounds, as well as ocean levels rise because of glacial melt. Thus you get this "up, down, then flat" (Land rises, oceans rise, land sinks a bit, ocean levels stabilize) graph of the sea level relative to the terrain:
coastal sea levels.jpg
A grad student picked up on this and did a thesis looking in detail at the local maximum sea level. She found a couple places in coastal NH that were above sea level even during that peak.
I dunno if anyone else is interested, but I was fascinated by this. And I suspect there are similar stories around the Great Lakes, with those huge glacial lakes formed as the glaciers melted, AND the movement of the land as the glacial load was removed.
dave
I always wondered about the claim of roding sea levels due to glacial melting.So my curiosity was about the opposite point.
So how low were the sea levels when glaciers were at peak formation?
Some studies indicate they were likely 400 ft lower than today.
So how many civilizations were wiped out as the rose. Is that what happened to Atlantis?
Was Noah's flood about that water cresting over a certain range of hills formations, flooding the valley below?
It makes me wonder what existed that is now gone below the ocean waves.
Well, the global sea level low point at the glacial maximum, based on the paper that looked across a lot of data, is probably about -125m to -150m at roughly the glacial maximum of 20k years ago. As I said earlier, calculating sea level is surprisingly complex because the continents got pushed down, as well as the sea levels reducing due to water removed from the oceans (and sitting as ice on the land.) And of course, in the northern regions where the continents were pushed down by larger ice loads (North America, Scandinavia, northern Eurasia), the coasts there will show a different coastline than around the equator.
But starting about 10k years ago, and particularly 6k years ago (4000 BC), sea levels have been pretty stable. So I don't think the concept of 'global floods' per Noah or Atlantis are born out by the current evidence. (Ice core data is one of the newer measures of sea levels and global temperatures, based on ratios of oxygen isotopes. Fascinating stuff!)
In short, the graph above for the Maine coast is pretty much the same pattern across the globe, with that oscillation (the pop and dip) that then levels out.
dave
Quote from: deemery on February 12, 2025, 09:40:19 AM...
I dunno if anyone else is interested, but I was fascinated by this. And I suspect there are similar stories around the Great Lakes, with those huge glacial lakes formed as the glaciers melted, AND the movement of the land as the glacial load was removed.
In fact, last week I looked up the history of Great Lakes water levels and found a fascinating page on how the Indiana Dunes came to be. Didn't anticipate your question, or I'd have bookmarked it :(