The geology of Rhode Island fascinates me. Much of what we see traveling through the state is the result of the last Glacial Period. The Wisconsin Ice Sheet extended south well beyond New England during the Laurentide Ice Sheet expansion. Its withdrawal through this region about 14,000 years ago marked the start of the climate change we continue to experience today and the process sculpted the New England landscape we see today. Route One – Post Road – in Rhode Island follows the crest of the moraine left by the glacier, and many of the small ponds in Rhode Island are old kettle ponds formed by the last remnants of the Wisconsin Ice Sheet.
Today’s photo shows a large glacial erratic deposited by the Ice Sheet in what is now Lincoln Woods State Park. Glacial erratics are boulders of various sizes that are carried by ice sheets and deposited in regions some distance from where the boulder was formed. Rhode Island is famous for the stone walls that mark property boundaries and “New England Potatoes,” small rocks and boulders that pop up in fields every spring. These are all glacial erratics, courtesy of the Wisconsin Ice Sheet, and all tell the story of the region’s icy history.
You’ll notice that this erratic is split into two large pieces. Popular lore claims that it’s the result of an earthquake in ancient times. Reality, however, is less dramatic. The split is actually caused by a natural process involving ice. As water freezes in small imperfections in the rock, it expands, weakening that section of rock in the process. Over time, that freeze-thaw cycle causes large cracks to form until eventually, as in the case of this erratic, gravity takes over and the rock itself splits into multiple pieces. It wasn’t an earthquake that split this rock, it was the effect of ice over thousands of years.
Processing today started with a brilliant warm filter in Topaz Adjust. I then sharpened the rock’s details a bit with a detail light filter desaturated and overlaid using a soft light blend mode and high pass filter at 3 pixels. I adjusted the levels a bit, primarily to tone down the trees in the background, and then adjusted the hue (again for the trees.) Saturation was also brought down a notch. I added a sepia photo filter and then adjusted the levels one final time.
awesome shot, my grandfather (Opa) had a farm and on the land was a huge rock in the middle of a forest, this really reminds me of it, i used to play around in the woods and would often climb the rock, it had a large crck in its tip, mostly birch stand around it, farm had been sold after his passing never been back since 1990.
I really like that you take time to write so much about every photo that you upload here