North Salem Balanced Rock

There is a unique geologic feature in the Hudson Valley which, for some reason, I have never visited in all the years I've been in the area.  I drove out there this past weekend to view it with my family.  It's called Balanced Rock and it's in the town of North Salem in Northern Westchester County near the Connecticut board (a few miles south of I-84).

Balanced rock is easy to find and visit since it's located right on the side of the road with good parking on town property with a nice interpretive sign.

As the sign says, geologists call this an erratic.  I personally don't think it's a man-made dolmen despite its striking appearance,  That doesn't mean Native Americans didn't consider it a sacred site, they may have, but I'm not aware of any archaeological evidence for ancient activity here (especially by seafaring Celts!).

The boulder itself is granite and a number of web sources state that it's 16 x 14 x 10 feet in size (I didn't measure it but it seems about right).  Let's simplify to 5 x 4 x 3 meters.  That's 500 x 400 x 300 cm or 60,000,000 cm³.  Granite has a density of about 2.7 g/cm³ which gives us 162,000,000 g or 162,000 kg of mass.  That's about 178 tons or three times what is says on the sign (my estimate would be an upper limit since the rock isn't a perfect rectangular box).

However much it weighs, it's a massive rock.  The rock is heavily weathered but a close look at the surface in places shows that it's a pink granite (the pink minerals are potassium feldspar crystals).  Granite like this is found a bit north in the Hudson Highlands.

The boulder is resting securely on five other rocks (possibly Wappinger Group limestone/dolostone).  If you visit, and want to crawl underneath, clear the spider webs before sticking your head in there (I speak from experience).

Despite how precarious it looks, the rock is very stable.  Even my kids couldn't push it over!

So, how did something like this form?  Well, all over the Hudson Valley of New York we find big boulders sitting around (really, all over the northern parts of the United States).  They were picked up and transported by massive continental glaciers during the last ice age (actually, several advances and retreats of glacial ice between 2 million and ten thousand years ago).  When the glaciers melted, these rocks, some as large as houses, were dropped out and are known as glacial erratics (I'll show more examples of glacial erratics around the Hudson Valley in another post).  While most rocks were dumped onto the ground, this one happened to be dumped onto a few other rocks forming the unique structure we see today.

Here's a neat example of another balanced glacial erratic from near Valtola, Finland that's even larger than the North Salem rock.  Called Kummakivi, which translates as "strange rock" from Finn, it's associated with legends of trolls and giants (of course!).

While some websites claim "There is still no scientific explanation for how the rock ... has wound up in such a perplexing position", they are full of shit since any geologist will tell you it's a glacial erratic - the bottom rock even has nice glacial striations (scratches from rocks carried in the bottom of moving ice sheets) clearly visible in many of the photographs of the site.

Back to the New Salem rock.  If you search the web, a lot of the information you'll see about Balanced Rock is from New Agers who credulously claim it's a dolmen.  Dolmens are megalithic tombs found in various places in Western Europe (most notably Ireland).  They typically consist of flat rocks supported by three or more uprights.  While superficially looking like a dolmen (not much, in my opinion, since the proportions aren't right), it's far likelier to be a glacial erratic.  Nevertheless, I tried pulling some psychic energy from the rock.

 

My chakras are still tingling.

Indian Pipe

While hiking in the Catskills last Sunday I saw a distinctive planet called Indian pipe (Monotropa uniflora).  While it superficially looks like a fungus, it's actually a flowering plant which lacks chlorophyll (hence the white color).

So, with no chlorophyll, this plant can't photosynthesize.  Plants like this are called saprophytes and, like fungus, obtain their nutrients from decaying plant matter.  This explanation is overly-simplistic, however, and the true relationship is far more interesting.

Throughout the forest floor, threads of fungus, called hyphae, are interacting with tree roots in a symbiotic relationship called a mycorrhiza.  Fungi get sugars from the trees (via photosynthesis of the trees leaves) while the fungi help pass minerals to the tree which they can more efficiently harvest from the soil.  It's a mutually beneficial relationship.

The Indian pipe, on the other hand, exploits this relationship in a parasitic way.  It taps into that underground network of fungal hyphae and extracts both minerals and sugars from it (the sugars that originally came from trees).  It most-likely does this by exploiting the same chemical cues that the fungi and trees use in their symbiotic relationship.

Indian pipe belongs to the Ericaceae family of plants - the same family as cranberries, blueberries, azaleas, and rhododendron.  So why did Indian pipe lose its chlorophyll?  Well, at some point, ancestors of this plant figured out how to tap into that fungal food source.  This allowed the plant to give up the costly process of photosynthesis and grow on the densely shaded forest floor where there was less competition from green plants.

By the way, should you encounter Indian pipe in your wanderings in the wood, don't bother picking it - it quickly turns black.

Other names for Indian pipe include corpse plant and ghost plant.  It was one of poet Emily Dickinson's favorite flowers and strikingly graces the cover of a posthumous book of her poems.

The flowers on the book came from a painting given to her in 1882, a few years before her death, by her neighbor Mabel Loomis Todd. Dickinson responded in a thank-you letter:

"That without suspecting it you should send me the preferred flower of life, seems almost supernatural… I still cherish the clutch with which I bore it from the ground when a wondering child, and unearthly booty, and maturity only enhances the mystery, never decreases it.”

Some have compared Dickinson, the reclusive lady dressed in white, to the pale Indian pipe living alone on the melancholy shaded forest floor.

 

'Tis whiter than an Indian Pipe —
'Tis dimmer than a Lace —
No stature has it, like a Fog
When you approach the place —
Nor any voice imply it here
Or intimate it there
A spirit — how doth it accost —
What function hath the Air?
This limitless Hyperbole
Each one of us shall be —
'Tis Drama — if Hypothesis
It be not Tragedy —

Waving at Saturn

Below, to the left, is one of the images Cassini took of Earth from Saturn on July 19 (I talked about this last Friday).  On the right, is an image of the Earth-Moon system from the Messenger spacecraft (currently orbiting Mercury) taken on the same day.  From Saturn, the Earth is 898 million miles (1.44 billion kilometers) away and from Mercury it's 61 million miles (98 million kilometers) away.

 

These images are pretty amazing.  On that bright speck in each of the them lives, and has lived, every human being ever in existence.  The furthest any human has ever traveled is to that other smaller speck next to it.

At the very moment Cassini was imaging this Earth (5:30 pm EDT), my daughter and I were on that planet facing toward Saturn (148° azimuth, 31° altitude in the mid-Hudson Valley) and waving hello from my backyard.

Greetings from Earth!

 

[I rewrote this post because I made an error in the original confusing the Messenger and Cassini images - sorry about that!]

I wish I could make morons disappear...

Lest you think I make this shit up, check the links.  Dan Delzell is a pastor at Wellspring Lutheran Church in Papillion, Nebraska.  He's also a regular columnist for a publication called the Christian Post.

Delzell wrote a bizarre little column last week - "The Illusion That Seduces and Bewitches Magicians."  In his article, he wrote:

"I had never heard of the magician, Dynamo, until I read about how he floated alongside a double-decker bus in London recently. I watched the video. Personally, I think it was legit. I believe this was a paranormal event and an authentic example of levitation."

Delzell continued...

"Whether the levitation is experienced by young girls playing a dangerous occult "game" at a slumber party, ("Light as a feather, Stiff as a board") or by street magicians as shown on YouTube videos, paranormal things happen when people engage in practices that are rooted in sorcery, magic and witchcraft. Many magicians and other occultists have experienced levitation and various forms of supernatural power. These sorcerers typically cast spells or perform other rituals in an attempt to conjure the power to accomplish these feats. It is becoming more and more commonplace to see such expressions of magical performance."

My only response, in my best George Takai voice, is simply "Oh my!"

So, what's this "paranormal event" he's talking about?  A quick YouTube search yielded the following video ad for Pepsi with Dynamo "levitating" alongside a London bus.  I assume this is what Delzell was referring to in his column:


Yes, there are people walking our streets, people who look perfectly normal and hold responsible jobs (like Lutheran pastor and columnist), who believe this little stunt was DONE WITH ASSISTANCE FROM THE PRINCE OF HELL, SATAN HIMSELF!

If you want to have your illusions shattered, read about how this trick (yes, it's a trick) is done.  Of course the true believer will just argue that while some may do these cheap tricks, Dynamo performed a secret ceremonial rite to sell his soul to Satan for the chance to star in a Pepsi commercial.