Science, History and Art in the Northeast US Tour Package

The group will assemble mid-afternoon for introductions and a visit to the nearby Beneski Museum of Natural History at Amherst College. 

The Beneski Museum has the famous Hitchcock Ichnological Cabinet, housing thousands of beautifully displayed Jurassic dinosaur and other footprints assembled by Edward Hitchcock. Amongst these footprints are some revealing that these animals bore both scales and feathers, showing that Hitchcock’s belief the tracks belonged to birds, which he took to his grave, was in fact prescient in ways he could not have imagined.

Overnight in Northampton. Group dinner.

The first full day will be spent in the northern Hartford and adjacent Deerfield Rift Basins examining the consequences of the end-Triassic extinction. 

The first stop is Summit House on the giant, Jurassic age Holyoke lava flow, one of the largest eruptive events in Earth history, covering 11 million square kilometers. This where here Thomas Cole painted “View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm —The Oxbow”, a painting we will see on day 5 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The work view bemoans the Industrial Revolution then sweeping across the United States.

We then travel north to Montague, Massachusetts, home to the second freight canal in North America (1776) and  to an industrial village based on water power (1866). The Jurassic strata under the Great Falls have produced thousands of fish fossils and nearly as many dinosaur and other footprints. Lake strata  above lava flows clearly record the cyclicity caused by climate changes paced by variations in the Earth’s axis and orbit tracking the gravitational dance of the planets. These Milankovitch cycles are still operating today.

Following a lunch with spectacular views of Mount Holyoke we will travel south to nearby Mount Tom State Reservation to visit a large, abandoned quarry in the Holyoke Basalt lava flow.

The last stop of the day will be the “Dinosaur Footprints” preserve on the bank of the Connecticut River which produced the first reported dinosaur footprints, described in 1836 by the Reverend Edward Hitchcock of Amherst College as tracks of giant birds.

Overnight in Hudson, NY. Free evening.

Today we focus on Hudson Valley geology and its influence on art, beginning on the west side of the Hudson River with a visit to the house and studio of the founder of the Hudson River School of painting, Thomas Cole. We then drive across the Rip Van Winkle Bridge to the east side of the Hudson for a short, guided tour of Olana, the spectacular estate of Cole’s disciple Fredric Church.

We then travel to Nyack, New York, the early home of the thoroughly American artist Edward Hopper. We will stop at the former Manhattan Quarry, depicted in one of Hopper’s watercolors and now Nyack Beach State Park, to see Late Triassic river and lake deposits and the Palisade Sill, an extensive complex of igneous rocks that is a part of the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP). This and other quarries provided the facade for New York City’s ubiquitous brownstones (townhouses); a successful campaign to save the Palisades converted all the quarries facing the Hudson into the Palisades Interstate Park. 

We then travel a short way south to Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University where we will have a talk on paleoastronomy coupled with a viewing of sediment cores from the 200-230 million-year-old Newark Rift Valley and much more recent cores of the last million years from the Mediterranean Sea, both spectacularly showing the influence of Milankovitch cycles as well as the effects of chaos in the Solar System.

Overnight in Manhattan, NY. Free evening.

The group will visit two of the world’s great museums. 

Day 4 will begin at the American Museum of Natural History, with a pre-opening special tour of the Geology and Dinosaur galleries and a “behind the scenes” look at the paleontology areas. This will be followed by a guided walk exploring the geology of adjacent Central Park. The afternoon and evening will be free to explore the many sites of the city (we can make recommendations!).  

Day 5 will commence across Central Park at The Metropolitan Museum of Art with a look at paintings of the Hudson River School, the first truly American style of painting, by Thomas Cole (including his “View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm - The Oxbow”, the setting for which we saw on our first full day), Frederic Church and Edward Hopper. There are many other paintings related to geology, landscapes, and science we will view.

In the afternoon we will embark on an architectural boat trip around Manhattan. An expert from the American Institute of Architects will provide commentary on Art Deco spires, engineering marvels and recent buildings by noted architects as we cruise the Hudson, East and Harlem rivers. The tour will also feature geological highlights such as the Palisades (a giant magma intrusion of the Central Atlantic Igneous Province). 

Overnights in Manhattan, NY. Free evenings.

After traveling west from Manhattan, we will walk through a wooded set of gorges at Pompton, New Jersey, that held a 19th century forge. Nearby outcrops will allow us to get up close and personal with highly fish-fossil-rich Jurassic-age strata deposited in great lakes.

We will lunch on one of the oldest lava flows of the CAMP at an overview of the Great Falls of the Passaic River. Following the Battle of Monmouth on July 10, 1778, Alexander Hamilton convinced George Washington and the Marquis de Lafeyette that this would be a great site for an industrial center. 

We continue south to the Watchung Reservation, a nature reserve that includes a complex of 18th-century houses, the 19th-century paper mill village of Feltville and outcrops with fossil fish and dinosaur footprints.

The day’s last stop will be at a large active quarry in lava flows of the CAMP. The eruptions of the flows released carbon dioxide and sulfur that caused the end-Triassic mass extinction, but ironically in the future may be used to sequester human-produced fossil-fuel carbon dioxide. After cooling, fissures, caves and lava tubes trapped various reptiles, the remains of which are found here. 

Overnight in Doylestown, PA. Final group dinner.

The morning will begin with a visit to two huge active quarries revealing sediments deposited in Late Triassic giant lakes that waxed and waned in depth with wet-dry cycles paced by variations in the Earth’s axial orientation and orbit. When deep, these lakes were home to numerous fishes and reptiles that left their remains as fossils, some of which we will no doubt find.

Following a picnic lunch and a display of rock cores and fossils, illustrating major concepts of our tour, we will visit two additional spectacular active quarries. One is developed in Late Triassic lake strata strongly modulated by dust from Africa, again paced by astronomical gravitational variations. The other is excavated in ancient magma from the gigantic CAMP that was injected into older lake sediments, releasing enormous amounts of carbon dioxide and sulfur and causing both global warming and intense volcanic cooling that resulted in a mass extinction allowing dinosaurs to take over the world. 

The tour ends following our arrival in Philadelphia. Participants may opt to dropped off at a downtown hotel to continue their exploration of the region, or to be delivered to the Philadelphia International Airport.

Note: this provisional itinerary is subject to change.