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03/09/2022 07:30 AMJanet R. Stone couldn’t have a more appropriate last name. Janet, who lives in Deep River, is a geologist.
She has just received the 2021 Dr. Melvin Woody Lower Connecticut River Conservation Award from the Lower Connecticut River Land Trust.
The conservation award is named for Melvin Woody of Lyme, a retired Connecticut College professor long active in conservation and land trust programs. The Lower Connecticut River Land Trust is made up of the 14 land trusts, representing the 17 communities of the Lower Connecticut River Valley Council of Governments.
Janet, a geologist emerita with the United States Geological Survey (USGS), is a founding member of the Deep River Land Trust and has served as president on several occasions, most recently from 2014 to 2020. She also served for many years on Deep River’s Conservation and Inland Wetlands Commission.
She recalls the early years when the Deep River Land Trust, a non-profit organization, had only two properties. Now it has 18. Most have been donated.
“We really don’t have the money to purchase things,” Janet says.
Still, one property at Pratt Cove was acquired using a combination of fundraising and a grant from the state.
“Fundraising, that was something new for us,” she says, but adds that the land trust will have to do more of it as it looks to acquire properties in the future.
“The job of the land trust is to protect and preserve open space,” Janet explains.
Outreach, she adds, is of continuing importance in informing a wider public of these goals and convincing people of their importance.
As someone who has specialized in mapping during her 40-year career as a professional geologist, Janet has also created maps of the walking and hiking trails within land trust properties. Currently there are trails on six of the land trust areas. Janet says one of the land trust’s goals is the creation of trails on more of the properties.
Janet, who grew up in the Moodus section of East Haddam, started college without any clear idea of what she would major in.
“I had fallen into a French major,” she says, but then she took an introductory geology course. “I fell in love and took only geology courses after that.”
Janet’s husband Byron Stone is also a geologist who still works for USGS. The couple has two adult children, Jeremy and Elizabeth, both of whom graduated from Valley Regional High School.
Janet spent much of her career as a geologist specializing in the quaternary period, the time from some 2.58 million years ago to the present when massive ice sheets grew and receded over the earth. One of her notable projects was the mapping of Connecticut and Long Island Sound during this period.
When she gives talks about geology, however, the question she is asked most often is not about the quaternary period, but about something else. People want to know if it was true that the Connecticut River once ran to New Haven and emptied into New Haven Harbor rather than Old Saybrook. The short answer: That never could have happened. Layers of volcanic basalt rock between what are now Middletown and New Haven would have made that scenario impossible.
Connecticut, Janet points out, is a small state with a complex geologic history. Part of the state comes from an early formation of North America, proto-North America, but eastern portions of the state come from, among other geologic sources, a micro continent called Avalonia that collided with the North American land mass.
Parts of Avalonia underlie Great Britain and Southern Ireland, and the rift that divided the ancient continent’s different sections became the Atlantic Ocean.
There is a particularly interesting geologic feature in Deep River, observable at Devitt’s Field: the Honey Hill Fault, where rock of the ancient Avalonian continent butts up against rock formed by sediment from an ancient ocean.
Geologist Robert Wintsch, then a professor at the University of Indiana but now a Haddam resident working on a new geologic map of the entire state of Connecticut, suspected that the rock outcropping at Devitt Field was an excellent place to see the Honey Hill Fault. So, Janet and other members of the Deep River Land Trust, aided by the late first selectman Dick Smith, recruited some Boy Scouts to dig a trench across the outcrop to expose the area of contact, which was covered with glacial soil.
Janet admits it can be hard to distinguish between rocks with geographic different origins.
“They’re all grey rocks,” she says, but chemical analyses of their composition reveal where they came from.
A decade ago, Janet was one of a group of geologists who formed The Geological Society of Connecticut. Many other states had such societies but, until that time, Connecticut did not. Janet was president at one time and is still on the board.
“It brings together geologists from different areas, academic, consulting, business, and government and provides a venue for closer contact,” she says.
Membership is also open to those who do not work in the field but who are interested in geology.
Janet points out that periods of warming climate have occurred repeatedly in the millenia-long history of the earth.
“Climate change is going to happen anyway,” she says, “but how it happens and how drastically it happens are very much a function of human activity,” she says. ‘When people add to what is happening, it is going to happen much faster.”
For more information on the Deep River Land Trust, visit www.deepriverlandtrust.org.