Natural Thinking

A couple weeks ago I went after a Strava road bike segment that goes from Rt 6 in Hambden, south along Kile Road. It's a little over 2 miles and has a 50 foot climb in the middle.

A while after I finished the ride it dawned on me that Kile Road passes over glacial landforms which were created about 14,000 years ago. The elevation chart for the segment is more or less a cross section of the "Defiance Moraine", which spans Ohio from east to west and is named for the city of Defiance. It's a terminal moraine which is the debris that's piled up at the end of a glacier as shown in the following picture of a glacier in Greenland.

By NASA / Michael Studinger

Kile Road is an open air glacial surface feature museum. The moraine landform is subtle, but noticeable especially on a bicycle. It's even visible on google streetview. It's noticeable because Kile Road otherwise follows the east branch of the Cuyahoga River Valley which is about 1.5-2 miles wide there. At the center of the valley the elevation is around 1180 feet and it's about 1300 feet on either side. The valley runs north-south, but the moraine on Kile is running east-west. Also, there's a large flat and open area which was a lake in glacial times. There are several farms there, plus Pioneer Waterland water park whose central feature is a remnant of that glacial lake.

The following map is from the ODNR Ohio Geology Interactive Map. It shows the Strava segment (the red line) and the portion of the moraine which forms the hill on the segment, which is the dark green mass that is in the middle of the segment.

Both the moraine and ancient glacial lake weren't all that "obvious" to me even after studying local geology for many years by riding my bike around and looking at rock formations and also reading about the subject and studying maps for years. The geologists who put the story of Earth together in the 19th and 20th century managed to deduce a complex narrative from very subtle clues. I think they represent a very good example of following the evidence to get to the "truth" no matter where it leads.

The "truth" revealed by geology is the operation of the earth and climate system, which runs, obviously, without human intervention and with no regard for humans at all. It shows humanity isn't uniquely important and will come and go like many other species before us. The evidence for that is everywhere. For example, my house and property is right on top of the Defiance Moraine, so about 14,000 years ago, it looked like the photo above and a huge field of ice rolled off into the north. Millions of years before that, this land was under an ocean, etc...

People (including me) struggle and strain and fight over piles of imaginary nonsense. The masses allow the most horrible trashbucket element of humanity like politicians and priests goad them on into wreaking all sorts of havoc and murder based on magical thinking nonsense.