The buffleheads are back in regular numbers (two to five pairs per day) and I’ve had good fun watching them. The migrating fowl seem to be on hiatus at this time. The total freeze-up of our region has rerouted or delayed all traffic except the eagles who have been seen cruising for a meal from time to time.
I’ve been thinking about some of the geological events that have occurred recently. When I forsook mechanical engineering in 1954, I decided to become a geology major. Under Dr. Taylor, the chairman of the geology department at Columbia, we studied landforms and their geomorphology. The primary thrust at that time was to read the land around you to try to determine how the land was formed, what held the higher areas up and what sort of catastrophe shaped the hills, lakes, cliffs, streams and other variations. We studied landform history and dynamics in order to predict changes.
I can vividly recall being given a whole list of topographic geologic maps and being told to study the contours and resulting landforms. The idea was to determine what was the result of general wearing-down of the land and what was the result of some more violent events such as volcanoes and major earthquakes. We also looked at incongruities in the landscape, such as the visible truncation of a ridge and its continuation with an offset from its original course.
Probably the easiest thing to notice was a fall of large rocks that tumbled into a valley, resulting in a lake behind the fall. After a few hundred or thousands of years, the stream eventually eats its way through this material and the water in the valley then continues to eat its way down through the bedrock.
We were given a few choice areas to examine and the tip that we should look for old landslides and possible new ones pending. Most landslides are slow-moving affairs like the recent one in the news in Jackson, Wyoming, where there was construction up against a huge flat-topped glacial deposit of sand and gravel (called a butte in that area). The construction changed the supporting land structure, either by undercutting it or starting a move downhill on some unseen slip surface or layer of water bearing slippery stuff.
As we all know, if you kick Mother Nature you might find yourself engulfed. Sinkholes are also a water course situation, but in this case, the water dissolves the underlying limestone to such an extent that there is no understructure left and down you go.
An excessive change in rainfall often provides the slip to make soil move. In Lafayette, just south of Route 20, there was a slow moving landslide right next to one that had happened a few years previously. No one recognized that excessive rain could move the soil to the south again. Homes were consumed and water wells in the general area were contaminated and rendered useless. A big attempt was made to try and get some federal money to help install a water line to replace the wells, but this was unsuccessful.
The folks in Oregon recognized that a slide could be possible and that it would engulf homes and perhaps kill folks, but I’m sure there was no provision or law to persuade them to move or the funds to move them. These conditions did not change instantly and if folks had been warned, they might have vacated. If the Japanese are told that a big tsunami is immanent and might reach 3 miles inland, I am sure that they will jump into their Hondas and make tracks across those 3 miles as fast as they can go.
Landform changes are usually slow and over many years. It is difficult for people to identify a location that might be a bad spot to build homes. Someone has a house to sell and someone wants a home in the woods, so the possibility of fire, a mudslide, or a landslide does not seem to deter the developer or buyer. I suggest if you consider purchasing such a property that you should ask someone who has been in the area for two generations and is not trying to sell you something, what happens when it doesn’t rain and what happens if it rains hard for three or more days.
It’s no wonder that geology moved on to plate tectonics and continental drift. There is a lot of action involved. It causes geologic phenomena like the Ring of Fire. The problem is that people don’t want to move just because of a potential danger, even though the odds are 100 percent certain that a serious situation will occur sometime in each century, resulting in a large loss of life and property.
Joseph Spalding is a long-time Skaneateles resident who enjoys sharing his observations about the Skaneateles lakeshore and community. He can be reached at 685-6937.
