today as each year the Atlantic Ocean grows about an inch wider. From an economic standpoint, an inch a year is not very important - trans-Atlantic airfares are not likely to be affected very soon. But this is the speed at which continents collide, oceans close, and new ones grow.

Although less dramatic than the formation and break-up of Pangaea, the events since the break-up hold no less importance for the molding of Connecticut. These have been the millennia of erosion, unhurriedly rusting away the terrane cars. Like the movement of plates, erosion is a leisurely phenomenon that proceeds inchmeal. But when given the teeth of time, plate movements make mountains out of molehills and erosion makes molehills out of mountains. Erosion has created a Connecticut that looks quite different today than it did just after the break-up. Like geologic termites, streams and rivers chewed the Appalachians deep down to their roots. The sediment produced coursed into the ocean, slowly building the coastal wedge and continental shelf.

Miles of material have been removed from the Uplands. In Connecticut, erosion has proceeded so far that people often don't recognize that the Uplands are part of the Appalachian Mountain belt, which geologists consider to stretch from Georgia to Newfoundland. In fact, more has been removed than the greatest height above sea level that the Uplands ever attained. One might well wonder, then, why Connecticut isn't below sea level today. The answer lies in the similarity of the Earth's crust to icebergs. On the global scale of things, crust is actually fairly light stuff and floats on the infernal internal sea of the Earth's mantle. As with an iceberg, there is more mass below than appears at the surface. So, when erosion removes rock from above, a mountain will bob up almost as high as its original height - but not quite. Because erosion has removed some of the mountain's total mass, it cannot maintain the same size it previously did. You can see this principle working if you take a pan of water and float an ice cube in it. As the ice cube melts, it will always bob up and maintain one edge above water.

The next act in Connecticut's geologic history was glaciation. The global climate began cooling off around 35 million years ago, when Antarctica donned its ice cap. But glaciation began only 3-5 million

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