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The Changing Face of Connecticut

The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form and nothing stands; They melt like mists, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

Tennyson

If you haven't had the opportunity to drive the countryside with geologists, you may not have seen that special faraway look that sometimes creeps across their faces as they gaze out at the land dashing by. When most normal folks would be thinking about the farms, forests, and houses that characterize a landscape, geologists are seeing something much different. The mental calendar has flipped backwards to a time well before there were calendars, houses, farms, or even forests, and for them the car is passing mountains, seas, volcanos, and tropical beaches. More rational folk might see an old mill dam - but a geologist sees a deep valley carved by erosion; a colonial church spire - a big streamlined hill sculpted by a glacier; a canopied tobacco field - an ancient lake; a majestic mountain - hard, erosion-resistant rock forged by the collision of continents. Suddenly, the look of reverie is replaced by an unfettered frenzy as a big road cut comes into view. "Wow, what a cut! Look at the vertical foliation and cross-cutting pegmatites. That's Africa ramming the Americas.' With the intensity of a speed reader, the geologist absorbs and catalogues the information in the road cut, and then the reverie sets in again.

There is unity between the land that most people see as they travel and the deep history that a geologist sees. Connecticut's landscape

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