This week, I attended a Rose Cafe with Todd Bittner, the director of Cornell University’s natural areas. While his work revolves around preserving Cornell’s botanical gardens and gorge trails, his talk focused less on what he does and more of a geologic history lesson on how Ithaca was formed. As a quick summary of the past 350 million years, when the Earth was all one continent called Pangaea, Ithaca was located near the equator, so this area was mostly tropical. However, once Pangaea broke and the continents began to shift, Ithaca was exposed to increasing amounts of glacial activity. The periodic freezing and melting of glaciers throughout Ithaca created the many gorges we see today.

The most interesting aspect of the talk was how the preexisting hill topography of Ithaca impacted the formation of the gorges. As you move further down the hill heading from South to North, the rocks exposed in the gorges are older. These rocks were buried the deepest on flat land, so the types of rocks that are seen in Taughannock Falls are buried way under Cascadilla Gorge. The rocks at Cascadilla Gorge are overall much newer and have been cut less. Also, Todd mentioned that many of Ithaca’s fault lines that the gorges formed along were nearly perpendicular. This formed many perfectly angular walls within the gorges. Nature is known for its many imperfections, so having right angles existing in nature are nearly unheard of. Since the talk, I took a quick walk over to a gorge just North of Cook to see what he was talking about. And, unexpectedly, there were perfect right angles running up and down the walls of the gorge. Ithaca is known for its natural beauty and it was incredibly interesting to learn how Ithaca’s topography became so unbelievable.