In The Beginnings . . .
When Ice Covered The Earth

By TAMARA HARTMAN

Before there were expressways and the Citicorp building, before the concepts of ethnic diversity and over-crowded schools, even before the native peoples lived off the land and explorers mapped its shores, there was just the immense wall of ice.

Glaciers moved over and sloped the landscape of Queens twice, the first time stopping at Hillside Avenue. Ice still covers the earth here in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. Tribune Photo By Ira Cohen

Slowly but relentlessly, it moved forward with a force equal to its size, ripping up the very ground of New England and dumped boulders and dirt into the sea in front of it, creating the land of Queens.

Allan Ludman, Queens College professor and chair of the College’s School of Earth & Environmental Sciences, explained that about 290 million years ago there was a "huge" collission between plates (continent-sized pieces of earth which geologists believe move on the planet over a bed of molten rock that errupts at some places to create new plates and melts down plates as they move under each other). This created a "single super continent" called Pangea.

Then, about 180 million year ago, Pangea began to split apart, opening up the Atlantic Ocean, and the ancient North American continent split off to move west, as it still does.

It was about 1-2 million years ago that the most recent ice ages began, forming "huge sheets of ice" called glaciers.

The glaciers moved down from the north and "like a snow plow" pushed up dirt in front of them, Ludman explained, moving the dirt and rocks out over the continent and into the water. The glacier stopped just in front of Hillside Avenue because it was the furthest point south that it could reach without melting.

The glacier stayed there for "a while," Ludman said – which to geologists is about 60,000 years – creating a "terminal morraine" (earth built up at the end of a glacier).

Then it melted back, leaving more dirt, as well as large chunks of ice covered by dirt. When the ice boulders melted, depressions were left that would later be called Alley Pond, Lake Success and Lake Ronkonkoma.

Later, the glacier advanced again, pushing more dirt in front of it, but this time falling far short of Hillside and moving at an angle, creating the North Fork of Long Island with its terminal morraine.

This second dumping of land made northern Queens’ more rugged and up-hill landscape, while the lighter pieces of gravel and dirt flowed out on the melting water to be deposited in southern Queens and the Rockaways as the water increased the sea level.

And so, Ludman explained, most of Queens is built on loose, unconsolidated material dumped to make land. Only in Long Island City does solid bedrock reach the surface so that a building the size of the Citicorp building can be properly anchored.

The rest is just a mingling of rock and dirt of all sizes and shapes pressed
together to form a single mass of land – the foundation for the diversity
above it.