Friday, November 1, 2024

Our New Jersey Volcano

Once upon a Jersey time

Sure, New Jersey had volcanoes. Our modern New Jersey once had an active volcano roughly the size of Mount St. Helens.

The site is now known as Rutan Hill in Wantage, NJ, but if we could go back to 430 million years ago, the Beemerville Volcano would be 10 to 20 miles across and spewing lava and ash for millions of years,.

Geologists say that the Beemerville Volcano is an extinct volcano and what we call Rutan Hill is what remains of the “volcanic neck.” The Sussex County location is 7 miles south of New Jersey’s highest elevation at the High Point Monument.

No worries about an eruption but a study from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory identified a new unmapped fault line that runs through Sussex County. On April 5, 2024 a magnitude 4.8 earthquake rocked New York City and shook sections of New Jersey. That's a bit more frightening for our time.

The hill and volcano neck is on private land but there is a road leading up the volcano called Volcanic Hill Road.

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