Pre-Glacial Ages ~ Bayonne New Jersey
Thousands of years ago, perhaps 5,000,
perhaps 20,000, before the northern section of the American
continent was lapped in glacial ice, the whole of Bergen Neck
(now Jersey City and Bayonne) was submerged land. The Hudson
River at that period had a double channel, the main one flowing
down the valley west of the Palisades, forming a vast sea north
of Staten Island and extending from Newark Heights to South
Brooklyn. This sea had two outlets; one west of Staten Island
and the other east; the latter now the Narrows.
Years later the ice cap from the Arctic regions slowly but
restlessly overspread the metropolitan district under hundreds
of feet of ice, until it had reached a point where the waste
from melting was as rapid as the advance. The ice finally
blocked the western channel with so much pulverized debris of
trap, pebbles, dirt, sandstone, etc., that it gradually closed
that branch of the river, thereby causing the Hudson to flow
east of the Palisades in a channel deepened and widened by these
forces.
After this change, when the ice had melted and the flow of water
in the western channel had consequently lessened, the land that
had previously been submerged, appeared. This included a narrow
strip running north and south, dividing the sea in the middle
and forming Bergen Neck, the southern extremity of the. Palisade
ridge.1
1. See article in the New
York "Herald" July 10, 1904.
Source: First History of Bayonne, New
Jersey, by Royden Page Whitcomb, Published by R. P. Whitcomb, 24
East 37TH Street, Bayonne, N. J., 1904.
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