Manhattan Prong

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In the United States, the Manhattan Prong of the New England Uplands is a smaller belt of ancient rock in southern New York (including Manhattan, the Bronx, and segments of Brooklyn and Staten Island), parts of Westchester County, and upland portions of southwestern Connecticut. The bedrock underlying much of Manhattan consists of three rock formations: Inwood marble , Fordham gneiss , Manhattan schist , and Tuckahoe marble , which are well suited for the foundations of Manhattan's skyscrapers. [1] In April 2024, the largest earthquake to occur in the New York metropolitan area in 140 years, with a magnitude of 4.8, caused no damage to Manhattan's buildings, subways, or other infrastructure.

The Manhattan Prong and the Reading Prong are separated by the Newark Basin in the south, but the two features merge at the northern terminus of the Newark Basin in the vicinity of Peekskill, New York. A band of mountains that rise nearly one thousand feet along the northwestern margin of the Newark Basin in New York and New Jersey are called the Ramapo Mountains. Another belt of ancient metamorphic and igneous rock crops out along the southern margin of the Newark Basin south and west of Trenton, New Jersey. In this region, the rocks are referred to as part of the Trenton Prong.

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The topography of the New England Uplands section is that of a maturely-dissected plateau with narrow valleys, and the entire area is greatly modified by glaciation. It is the most widespread of the geomorphic sections in the New England Province, extending from Canada through New England down to the Seaboard section and extending southwestward through New York and New Jersey as two narrow upland projections, the Reading Prong and the Manhattan Prong. Numerous hills and mountains rise above the general level of the upland; except in the presence of mountains, the horizon of the regional landscape is fairly level. Glaciation has resulted in the erosion and rounding off of the bedrock topography and numerous rock basin lakes. Glacial drift is thin, patchy, and stony, and ice-contact features such as kames, kame terraces, and eskers are abundant. The surface of the New England Uplands slopes southeast from maximum inland altitudes around 670 meters, excluding the other mountainous sections of the province, to about 122 to 152 meters along its seaward edge at the narrow coastal Seaboard section, which goes down to sea level.

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The geology of the State of New York is made up of ancient Precambrian crystalline basement rock, forming the Adirondack Mountains and the bedrock of much of the state. These rocks experienced numerous deformations during mountain building events and much of the region was flooded by shallow seas depositing thick sequences of sedimentary rock during the Paleozoic. Fewer rocks have deposited since the Mesozoic as several kilometers of rock have eroded into the continental shelf and Atlantic coastal plain, although volcanic and sedimentary rocks in the Newark Basin are a prominent fossil-bearing feature near New York City from the Mesozoic rifting of the supercontinent Pangea.

References

  1. Sarah Bradford Landau; Carl W. Condit (1996). Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 18651913. Yale University Press. p. 24.

PD-icon.svg This article incorporates public domain material from The Highlands Province. United States Geological Survey.

40°50′17″N73°56′10″W / 40.838°N 73.936°W / 40.838; -73.936