Lester Park near Saratoga, NY
http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/exhibits/longterm/lesterpark/
“The fossils you’ll see at Lester Park are called stromatolites (“layered
rocks”). They were constructed by “blue-green algae” on a shallow sea
floor that is now exposed. While they were growing, New York and the
eastern US lay south of the equator.”
Stromatolites are wicked cool, and fossils of them like this are not super abundant.
I don’t know how I read the headline as “Tell us about your beloved geocities,” but I was all about to tell you about this beautiful 3-page geocities website I made in '97 where I proved conclusively that in an infinite universe, aliens had to exist. I think it even had spinning globe gifs, which really made it legit.
Writing-On-Stone Provincial Park in Southern Alberta
When the New Madrid earthquakes began in December 1811, the territory which is today northeastern Arkansas was sparsely populated. An early chronicler described the earthquakes’ effect as the ground moving like waves on the land, when suddenly the earth would burst, sending up huge volumes of water and sand, leaving chasms where the earth had burst open. Huge lakes were created (such as Tennessee’s Reelfoot), and near the St. Francis River in northeast Arkansas, vast tracts of land sank as far as fifty feet into the earth or disappeared into the river.
The Saint Francis Sunken Lands:
Goblin Valley State Park in Utah
Fellow Kansan seconds the Flint Hills. Proof that Kansas isn’t flat. Though we do have kind of crap geology for rock hounds. There are a few extinct volcanoes in Kansas, though. I went to on on a 4-H trip. IIRC it’s mostly Kimberlite and you can find all these small red garnets in it. There are a lot of cool fossils in West Kansas, especially around the chalk deposits. A guy I know has discovered new species of fish and pterodactyls.
Other cool places I’ve been to:
Grand Canyon - yeah hard to compare other places to it.
Hell, Cayman Islands - volcanic, spiky rocks.
Agates around Lake Superior in Duluth, MN - found a huge piece of red jasper with hematite and quartz veins.
I know I won’t have to suggest this area to anyone in the UK since they likely know about them, but I recently made a trip to the Burren in Ireland. Absolutely breathtaking.
The other area that completely gobsmacked me in Ireland was Delphi. It really reminded me of the most dramatic parts of the Scottish borders and highland.
Devil’s Tower is the coolest I’ve actually visited. An intrusion where everything around it eroded away? That’s cool stuff. It’s fun to just stare at.
Ringing Rocks in PA … the rocks ring !
The entire Driftless region of IA/MN/WI
Remarkable Rocks at the far western end of Kangaroo Island in South Australia. Weird, remote, beautiful.
I also came here to talk about my favorite geocities page with midi files and blinking tags and lovely altcaps text.
That’s how I read it too. Sounds like a sweet site you had there.
My favorite is actually in Northern Ireland - the Giant’s Causeway.
Isla Fernandina in the Galapagos is astonishing: one of the youngest places on Earth (only about 700,000 years old), and looks like a Mars-scape. It’s awesome rather than beautiful. The barest of ground lichen and lava cactus, otherwise virtually no flora or fauna.
this means something…
we need to get Lionel Hampton down there
@maggiek Am I to pronounce “geosites” like I’m American: “GEO-SIGHTS” or like I’m Greek: “ge-OS-uh-tees”? I guess I want it to rhyme with “curiosities”?
Tennessee’s got the Savage Gulf, which is gigantic, but particularly the Stone Door
the enormity of it doesn’t photograph well. above this photo are big overlooks that plunge straight down into the floor of the “Gulf,” a huge deciduous forest sunk down into the rock. You can see the floor where the light is creeping in at the bottom of the pic. Here’s what the top looks like
Further east is a similar place, Raven Point. there’s no good photos because there’s no good vantage point to capture one–the Point is supreme. it also has this arch
http://imgcdn.geocaching.com/cache/large/4d8b7b65-3b13-480d-af0a-12270af4fcae.jpg
Really, though, the stone formations of the whole region are breathtaking. If you’ve seen Micheal Mann’s Last of the Mohicans, that’s the same geology, just over on the North Carolina side of the mountains. Stuff like that is everywhere in Southern Appalachia. It’s the most beautiful place on Earth, I’ll tell you what.
Here in Georgia we’ve got this gigantic, weird bubble of granite that popped out of the ground called Stone Mountain, it’s pretty cool. the guide on the wire tram/ski-lift thing said that it’s just the tip of the iceberg, that the shaft of granite goes down much further below the surface than above.
Red Rock Coulee in Southern Alberta.
Strange, very cool and beautiful
