Chapter 1. Geology 101

When I left seminary in 1978, I thought I was through with school. Finally, out of the classroom and into the real world. Instead of professors grading my sermons and Bible studies, real audiences and real students would do the evaluations. Three years later, I found myself wishing for the structure of learning, the well-defined beginnings and regular markers of completion that came with a school program. And I felt the old siren song of rocks. I wanted to know more.

I had read Clark and Coffin and Gentry. I had read articles in church magazines and attended lectures and discussions. I could impress church people with my knowledge of the scientific evidence for a young earth. But I knew the only reason they were impressed was they had never studied the subject. I wanted to know more.

Suffolk County Community College was just off Crooked Hill Road. I saw the sign every time I drove to the south shore of Long Island. We had lived in New York long enough to qualify for resident tuition and the late morning schedule for the Geology 101 would not be too difficult to manage.
My guard was up. I knew the teacher would be teaching millions of years and evolution. He would assume the accuracy of radiometric dating and the geologic column, but at least I would be handling actual rocks instead of just reading religiously-based arguments.

Tom showed up in classic science professor attire, jeans and sweatshirt. He appeared to be only a couple of years older than I was. Everyone else in class was under twenty. They wore standard student uniforms–blue jeans and sweat shirts at beginning of the term in January, shorts and T-shirts come May. I wore my ministerial uniform–wool tweed jacket, dress slacks, knitted wool tie.

The first few weeks of class, there was nothing new. We were expected to memorize the major periods of geologic column–Cambrian, Permian, Jurassic, Pleistocene, etc.–with their putative dates. I read again about the basic rock types–igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic. It was elementary, pedestrian stuff, but since it was geology, I loved it.

We had our first quiz. I got ten out of ten. I wondered how anyone could have missed anything on it. I began wondering what could be so dangerous about geology. In lab we examined actual rocks. You could pick them up in your hand, break them with your hammer, analyze them with chemicals. There was not a lot of room for “opinions” or bias or prejudice. We were dealing with down-to-earth, concrete stuff.

Then there were the field trips. On south shore beaches we observed wave cut terraces. We saw how winter storms eroded the beach and moved sand “down” the coast. We examined the sand with hand lenses, noting the black and red grains mixed with the white silica. An obvious question: where did all this sand come from? Here on Long Island the answer was glaciers. Huge glaciers. Continental glaciers. Ice age glaciers.

It seemed preposterous. It was hard to imagine the entire states of Massachusetts and Connecticut covered a mile deep with flowing ice. But evidence of glacier action was evident all over Long Island. We visited the high point of Long Island. Near there in a construction site Tom pointed out in the side of an excavation the mix of large cobbles and the occasional boulder in a matrix of sand and gravel. This kind of deposit was typical of moraines–the rocky deposits at the foot and along the sides of glaciers. I saw the same thing in my backyard when I dug it up for a garden. This was definitely not what I had seen in the sides of gravel pits back in Memphis where I grew up.

The Greater New York Conference office was on Shelter Rock Road in Manhasset. Shelter Rock, was a huge, irregular boulder forty feet long, twenty feet wide and fifteen feet high weighing about 1800 tons. Its mineralogy matched bedrock in Connecticut, a hundred miles north across Long Island Sound. It is called a glacial erratic. The only plausible method of transport for Shelter Rock and other large boulders imbedded in the sand and gravels of Long Island was the movement of massive ice sheets across New England. The position, shape and composition of Long Island made perfect sense if you accepted continental glaciers. It made no sense at all, if you tried to explain it using Noah’s flood.

I kept waiting for Tom to start talking about evolution, about millions of years and the ability of “time” to make up for improbability in the evolutionary story. Instead he kept focusing our attention on things we could see and measure. Geology, in his classroom, was not primarily theoretical or historical. It was concrete and practical.

Long Island is a 120-mile long sand and gravel pile. All the water for human consumption was drawn from wells drilled into this gravel pile. Everything that landed on the surface of this gravel pile migrated downward–rainwater, industrial chemicals, septic system effluent, gasoline from leaking tanks, petroleum, run off from land fills. The only barrier between all this stuff and the aquifers holding Long Island’s drinking water were layers of clay. Whenever any of those clay layers were disturbed the risk of contamination dramatically increased.

We learned that already all the shallow aquifers on the island were contaminated. Suffolk county wanted to locate a landfill on the central ridge of the island. This was precisely the location with maximum potential for contaminating ground water.

The geology of water showed up in another major political/social issue. For decades people on Long Island had used septic systems. The island was perfect for septic systems. The sandy, gravelly loam always perked. You never had trouble getting rid of the water. Problem was the ground was so porous that along creeks and canals sewage seeped into the water. The sewage made its way in the Great South Bay, home of Long Island’s iconic clam fishery.

The intersection of sewage and clams let to occasional incidents of hepatitis. Some inshore areas were permanently closed to clamming because of the dangers of contamination. Clamming was a distinctive and prized part of local culture. Even people like me who had never eaten a clam valued the rugged, colorful character of the clammers, people who wrestled their livelihood from the shallow waters of the Great South Bay.

How to fix the problem? Suffolk County was building a sewer treatment facility and everyone on the south shore would be required to hook up to it. This would keep the sewage out of the Great South Bay. However, it would create another problem, potentially even more devastating to the clammers. With septic systems, all the water people flushed down their toilets and ran down their drains eventually percolated through the ground and ended up in the bay. This steady flow of fresh water reduced the salinity of the bay creating the perfect brackish conditions needed by the clams. With the installation of the sewers all this water would instead be contained in pipes and transported to the sewage treatment plant. After treatment, the effluent would be piped across the bay and out into the Atlantic Ocean, completely bypassing the bay. This loss of fresh water inflow would cause the salinity of the bay to rise endangering the existence of the clams.

In Tom’s class, geology was not theoretical speculation about the distant past, it was a description of the world I lived in. It offered guidance about garbage dumps and sewers and wells. It explained the behavior of the soil in my garden and the reason for special excavation devices at construction sites.

Over the years, in church I heard all kinds of mocking criticism of the silly notion of ice ages and great glaciers scouring the continent. But I was living on a 120-mile long moraine. There were no mountains in the neighborhood for glaciers to slide down. The only explanation for the hill I lived on and the dirt in my garden and the beaches I swam from was continental glaciers that plowed across New England.

I didn’t know how fast glaciers formed and moved, but I found it very difficult to compress all the obvious geologic history of Long Island–the formation and see-saw movement of continental glaciers–plus all the associated changes across North America–the appearance and disappearance of saber toothed tigers, camels, mammoths, long-horned bison, giant sloths–into the putative one thousand years between Noah and Abraham.

Since climate change is global, the ice in North America would have had to coincide with the Ice Age in Mesopotamia, and the continental glaciers were gone by the time Abraham was hiking from Haran to Canaan.

In church, I was used to mocking references to the de facto philosophy masquerading as science which undergirded geologists claims about billions of years. Geologists were characterized as men searching for a "scientific" excuse for their atheism. But the science we studied in geology class at Suffolk Community College did not focus on theory that mattered only in debates about geochronology and origins. Geology 101 was firmly connected to the gravel pile that was my home. Flood geology offered no helpful guidance for siting dumps, digging wells or placing the outfall pipe from a sewage plant. Geology 101 at Suffolk County Community College did not change my mind about the age of the earth or the mechanisms of creation. It did make it impossible for me to dismiss geologists as theoretical rebels against “the truth of the Bible.” It compelled me to honor geology as a science firmly anchored in reality. Which turns out to be the ultimate challenge to 6000 years.