Chapter 1: How the Land Was Formed -- -- Newsday.com

The Birth of Long Island

A half-billion years ago, it was a chain of volcano islands adrift in a tropical sea. Over untold millenia, it took new forms, like a lump of clay forever being reshaped.

Forged by the fiery collision of a now-vanished continent and a string of volcano islands, the oldest pieces of Long Island are a mystery whose secrets lie buried beneath hundreds of feet of sand and soil.

Ancient, Clean, Controversial

The oldest stuff at Jones Beach State Park isn't the 1950s rock and roll at the oldies shows, the vintage 1929 bathhouses, or even the Jones name, which comes from a British privateer who established a whaling outpost on the beach 300 years ago.

The Evolution of LI Sound

It has been an ancient river, a fertile valley, a vast ice field, and a milky, iceberg-laden lake almost 200 miles long. What it hasn't been, until recently, is the saltwater estuary that makes Long Island a long island.

The Prairie That Was

Toward the end of every August, the purple-pink, bell-shaped flowers of the sandplain gerardia burst into bloom in a small section of a 19-acre protected site in the southeast corner of Nassau Community College in Garden City. That the fragile, endangered member of the snapdragon family survives at all in this place is because its home is one of the last remnants of the great Hempstead Plains.

Ghost Forests Send a Message

The ghost forest lies at the end of a rutted road through a piney woodland, beyond a stand of cedar and tupelo trees, across a grassy wetland and over a weathered dune to the edge of a gently arcing beach on the southern shore of Flanders Bay.

More Floods in the Future?

On a moonlit night almost 20 years ago, a geologist snuck onto private land deep in the Calverton woods, canoed to the middle of a large pond and began lowering a long rope he had carefully knotted at three-foot intervals. He never got to the second knot.