I live with a sense of deep time. It offers perspective on our brief human presence within vast geologic space and time. For more than a decade, I sought to understand the deeper history of this region. Rock outcrops I studied and the bedrock I encountered in my geologic work provided fragments of the story. Newark Basin brings those fragments together, offering the sense of place I had long pursued.
This three-mile-deep “cut” extends approximately thirty miles across the basin, from the Coastal Plain and Princeton to the east (right), across central New Jersey, to the Highlands to the west (left), looking north.
The rocks visible in this image record the last quarter of Earth’s history. They formed through repeated cycles of continental collision and separation—continents converging to build supercontinents, rifting apart to open oceans, and colliding once again. As the most recent supercontinent, Pangaea began to break apart roughly 100 million years ago, crustal faults opened and blocks subsided, forming a rift basin now known as the Newark Basin. Sediment eroded from surrounding highlands was transported by streams and gradually filled the basin, layer upon layer.
The composition began with a published geologic cross section of northern New Jersey, vertically exaggerated 1.8× to clarify basin geometry. The deeper portion extends beyond that framework and represents my own interpretation, informed by field experience, regional research, and subsurface data.
Dozens of outcrops were photographed to capture representative lithologies and digitally sequenced to reflect the interpreted structure. Aerial photography assembles the land surface above, aligning present-day geography with its geologic foundation.
Photo-geologic composite created through field photography, geologic interpretation, and digital compositing.
