Trip to Niagara Falls Teaches More than Geology

You can’t miss the enthusiasm in Carl Brett’s and Warren Huff’s voices when they talk about the autumn trip they took to the Niagara Falls/Lake Erie area with other faculty members and graduate and undergraduate students. That’s probably because the four-day event accomplished so much and had such personal meaning for both.

The academic goals were clear. One was for participants to examine in detail the histories of sea level oscillation, climatic change, and marine animal life of the Silurian and Devonian Periods that occurred between about 370 and 440 million years ago. The Niagara Frontier is a world famous “natural laboratory” for the study of these events and has generated important concepts and hypotheses discussed by many geologists.

The rocks in the region also provide an indirect record of early uplifts of the Appalachian Mountains as a result of collisions between volcanic islands and a narrow strip of land or micro continent, sometimes called Avalonia, which includes parts of the present day Eastern Seaboard. An indirect record of those occurrences is contained in deposits that are exposed in the gorge of the Niagara River, and Huff calls them “an open textbook of Appalachian history.”

A second objective was to analyze the reshaping of the landscape by Ice Age glaciers that resulted in the formation of the Great Lakes and their drainage to form Niagara Falls. Monitoring by radiocarbon dating of clam shells buried in ancient river sands indicates that the 300-feet deep, seven-mile long gorge of the Niagara River was cut in the past 12,600 years. The flow rate of the Falls varied significantly then, from less than a quarter of the present flow to more than double. This was because vastly different amounts of water ran through the Niagara River at various times as glaciers melted away and opened other passageways for Great Lakes water. The rate of erosional recession at Niagara Falls was about three feet per year in early Colonial times, but erosion is much less today because so much water is diverted to generate hydroelectric power, which cuts the flow over the Falls by half at night.

Even though there was a lot to learn about the history of the area, the trip also afforded other kinds of glimpses into the past. For Warren Huff, it was one of many in the “already established tradition” he discovered when he joined the Geology Department in 1963: “It probably had its roots in the department’s emphasis on field work that dates back to its founding in 1907. This and many of the department’s other yearly trips, local, regional, and international, emphasize observation and collection of data in the field as the bases for geologic interpretation.

“It’s important to realize they also serve as a bonding experience for students and faculty. Our evenings are devoted to both formal discussions of the day’s activities and plans for the coming day, as well as informal conversations, campfire songs, and general camaraderie. Some of my fondest and most lasting recollections of past activities in this department have been of these field trips. We’ve been whitewater rafting on the New River, sliding down sand dunes along the Lake Michigan shore, hiking in the Smokies, boating on Lake Cumberland, and exploring underground in the fluorite mines of southern Illinois.”

For Carl Brett, travel to Niagara Falls is also a “personal thing.” He notes that his determination to become a geologist and paleontologist began there. Moving as a boy to the Niagara region from New Hampshire, where he had rarely seen fossils, he was “just stunned” when he “flipped over a rock and saw the markings of a fossil.”

“Taken with Niagara right from the start,” Brett was 15 when he made his first trip into Niagara Gorge nearly 40 years ago on the day after Thanksgiving in 1966. It was, he remembers, “an eye-opening and awesome experience for a kid.” On that day he discovered new fossils that would eventually become part of his PhD dissertation. He had the opportunity to walk on the dry bed of the Niagara River at the brink of the Falls in 1969, the year that engineers dammed off the American Falls to inspect rock fractures. Brett was married on a tiny island in the Niagara River. “And, yes, I did visit the Falls on my wedding day, partly to show the relatives a temporary ditch section full of fossil clams we were studying to date the Falls,” he adds.

Both Brett and Huff regard geology as synonymous with the outdoors, and field trips provide the opportunity to put into practice what they have taught in the classroom. But most important, the trips are proof that science is a very human activity. Different sets of eyes see different things in the same objects, and it is the comparison and discussion of these observations that forms the intellectual basis for the science.