In the plateau country of northeastern Ohio, the Cuyahoga River runs through something you would not expect there: a gorge, flanked by rolling uplands, its near-vertical cliffs of sandstone and conglomerate hidden under forest and meadow. It has other contenders for the title, but the Park Service suggests you could call it the vegetated Grand Canyon of the east.
Seas, rivers and ice
| Chapter | What happened |
|---|---|
| More than 380 million years ago | A shallow sea floods much of Ohio. Advancing and retreating many times, it lays down the clays, silts, sands and gravels that become the park's stack of bedrock |
| Millennia before the Ice Age | Ancient rivers cut down through those layers |
| Pleistocene, more than 10,000 years ago | Continental glaciers push south from Canada, bury the land in ice, and block and reroute the old rivers. Resistant bedrock just south of the park slows their advance, so they leave a complex record of deposits behind. The old river courses fill with sediment |
| Now | A young river system is cutting down through those glacial deposits, and surface processes keep reshaping the valley |
Geology touches nearly everything in the park, from its natural environment to its long human history.
Geologic map of the park, from the Geologic Resources Inventory. NPS.
What you can see
Rivers and their work; glacial features; bedrock exposures and ancient sedimentary features; bedrock caves; and lake-formed features and wetlands. The park sits in the Appalachian Plateaus Physiographic Province, and shares its geologic history and several of its rock formations with a much larger region.
Bicycles on the Towpath Trail. NPS.
What the park has to manage
The same geology creates work for park staff: flooding and the river's shifting behavior, groundwater availability, geologic hazards, abandoned mineral lands and disturbed ground, and the inventory, monitoring and protection of fossils.
The records behind it
The page is part of the NPS Geodiversity Atlas, a product of the Geologic Resources Inventory, which makes digital geologic maps and reports for more than 270 natural resource parks. For Cuyahoga Valley the inventory has scoping summaries, a digital geologic map for GIS, a report and a poster, and a Soil Resources Inventory project has been completed; all are in the NPS DataStore.
Sources
Based on "NPS Geodiversity Atlas — Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Ohio," National Park Service, Geologic Resources Inventory; a work of the United States government in the public domain.
In these publicationsCuyahoga Valley National Park
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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