Geology for the masses: Winifred Goldring made the mind-boggling past accessible to the curious

The recent dedication in Thacher State Park of a historical marker honoring Winifred Goldring, the late State paleontologist, has called attention to her remarkable writings. Though they were published over 90 years ago and have been long out of print, her “Geology of the Berne Quadrangle” and the shorter “Geology of John Boyd Thacher State Park” adapted from it are available in many libraries and occasionally turn up on Amazon or other websites featuring hard-to-find books.

Winifred Goldring lived most of her life in Slingerlands. As a child and as a young woman, she spent much of her time hiking in the Helderberg region and became fascinated with the rock layers and fossils.  The Helderbergs and especially the great escarpment are considered classic sites for the study of Devonian-age fossils and have long attracted scientists from all over the world.

Though it has been reported that when she first entered college she intended to study languages, her major required some science electives and the course of her life was set. In 1914, she began work with the New York State Museum. She was named State Paleontologist in 1939, the first woman in the United States to be appointed to such a position.

Over the years, she published numerous articles in scientific journals dealing with fossils. Though many of these are technical and of interest primarily to specialists, her 1935 State Museum Bulletin “Geology of the Berne Quadrangle” — which may well be considered her magnum opus — is an elegantly written work bringing the wonders of Helderberg geology to the general reader.

Scientific writing can often seem very dry to nonspecialists but writers such as John McPhee, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and our Hudson Valley author Robert Titus have a talent for not only making difficult concepts accessible to general readers but conveying the awe that scientific phenomena can inspire. 

When Winifred Goldring set out to write about the geology of the Helderberg area, she was faced with the challenge of explaining the changing environments that led to the formation of the rock layers — “strata” — that make up the Helderberg plateau. This meant describing the mineral content and the fossils within those strata to illustrate ancient worlds now irretrievably lost in the fog of time.

Goldring begins her work with a discussion of the origins of the plateau, writing in a time when the concept of plate tectonics — so crucial to the understanding of the history of Earth — was unknown. In addition, radiometric dating of rocks to determine their absolute age did not exist.

Thus, although the relative age of rock layers and fossils compared to one another allowed scientists to assign names such as “Devonian” and “Silurian” to geologic periods and to identify specific fossils as being peculiar to certain times, the absolute age of the fossils and the strata that contained them could not be determined.

In addition, the processes that caused the rise and fall of mountain ranges and plateaus and changing sea levels — now explained by the movements of Earth’s tectonic plates — were attributed to phenomena that seem quaint today. Nonetheless, in Goldring’s prose ancient environments and the creatures that dwelt in them are powerfully evoked.

Before her discussion of the strata, Goldring includes sections of her work on the vegetation of the area and the history of human settlements. She explains how the mineral content and physical characteristics of the rock layers determine the type of forest that each supports.

She devotes 20 pages to the history of the towns in the Berne Quadrangle and how they were influenced by its geology and geography as they developed. She also includes a short section on John Boyd Thacher State Park, which was later adapted and expanded into a separate monograph.

Diverse marine environments

The strata of the Berne Quadrangle are sedimentary, primarily shale, sandstone, and limestone and each tells a different geologic story.  Underlying the villages of Altamont and New Salem are the Schenectady beds and the Indian Ladder beds, sandstones and shales dating to the Ordovician Period, now known to be some 450 million years ago.

The sediments that compose them and the fossils contained therein — especially large quantities of fossil seaweeds — indicate they formed in the near-shore environment of an ancient ocean. Shale tends to form from petrified mud and the presence of muddy or sandy layers indicates transport by rivers and streams.  These sediments also imply the presence of nearby highlands — perhaps mountains — from whose slopes the sediments have been eroded.

Above them are two thin transitional beds, strongly suggestive of a continued ancient muddy environment, one of which — called the Brayman Shale — contains crystals of iron pyrites, commonly known as fool’s gold. In a number of places in the Helderberg Escarpment, these layers have weathered back beneath the strata above them producing shallow rock shelters sometimes erroneously labeled “caves” as in Paint Mine Cave on the Indian Ladder Trail.

Towering over the trail are two massive limestone layers, the Manlius and the Coeymans, both of which formed in the Devonian Period about 360 million years ago.

Named for the towns in New York state where they were first studied, these pure limestone units formed in an ocean environment in a time when there were no nearby mountains or streams to flood them with muddy sediments.

Resembling a stack of books, the thin layers of the Manlius are filled with tiny fossils called tentaculites. Looking like tiny carrots, these miniscule creatures were pteropods — cone-shaped shellfish — and a small slab of the Manlius limestone will often contain hundreds. Sometimes they are lined up parallel to one another, indicating that they died in shallow water affected by tidal currents.

Higher up in the Manlius are fossils of stromatapora, coral-like creatures that formed extensive reefs, which are preserved in the rock in easily observable swirling patterns.

The massive Coeymans limestone forms much of the upper part of the escarpment. It is filled with fossils such as brachiopods, sea lilies, corals, and trilobites, which suggest an environment similar to that of the Bahamas: warm, clear, rather shallow water. Being pure limestone, the Manlius and Coeymans readily dissolve to form caves, and extensive caverns in Knox, Gallupville, and Schoharie have resulted.

The slopes above the Coeymans limestone are in many places heavily forested and the underlying strata are not easily seen. However, their thick collections of fossils tell of rising and falling shorelines and strata originating on high-energy shorelines in which limestone has formed from massive layers of crushed shells and beach environments consisting of sand mixed with large shell fragments.

Higher up is a second prominent escarpment composed of the massive Onondaga limestone; its fossils tell of ancient reefs with a rich collection of creatures such as varieties of coral as well as sea lilies and trilobites. Like the Manlius and Coeymans, the Onondaga is a very pure limestone and many extensive caves have formed in it, notably in the Clarksville area.

Above the Onondaga are massive strata of shale and sandstone extending down through the Catskills and telling of the rise of a huge mountain range to the northeast during Devonian time from whose jagged slopes vast quantities of sand and silt were eroded into an extensive series of alluvial fans known today to geologists as the Catskill Delta. In its upper strata are the fossils of tall fern trees, among Earth’s earliest land plants.

A gift for the future

While Goldring notes with some wonder these diverse marine environments, she does not attempt to explain the cause of changing sea levels that result in these broad differences. For much of the first half of the 20th Century, geologists attributed the rise and fall of sea levels to a phenomenon known as “geosynclines.”

It was believed that there were depressions in the ocean floor into which massive amounts of sediment were being deposited by surface rivers and streams. At some critical point, the Earth’s crust would rebound like a trampoline carrying the strata and their fossils to great heights, forming high hills and mountain ranges.

The theory of plate tectonics in which Earth’s landmasses drift around the surface and interact with each other, colliding to throw up mountain ranges or volcanically producing ocean basins, had actually been proposed in the 1920s but was regarded as fantasy.

At the time of her death, Goldring was undoubtedly aware of “the new geology,” but never had the chance to rewrite “Geology of the Berne Quadrangle” in its light.

Nonetheless, the work stands as a readable, beautifully illustrated description of the strata that make up the Helderberg area and the ancient creatures that lived in the oceans in which they formed.

She describes the streambeds and hills and hollows of the plateau as places where environments that lie so far in the past as to be mind-boggling become accessible to the curious. When intact copies of the book are found, they come with an Earth-toned geological map that is not only a useful scientific tool but exists in its own right as a work of abstract art.

Dated in some aspects as “Geology of the Berne Quadrangle” may be, it remains a monument to the work of a remarkable woman who — like so many others — was enthralled by the history recorded in the rocks of the Helderbergs and chose to share it with those who came after her.