This absorbing book opens with an overview of the state's geologic history and proceeds with 13 road guides that unearth the stories behind the state's rocks, sediments, and minerals. More than just a guide, Roadside Geology of New Jersey is chock full of insightful discussions on such timely topics as sea level rise and climate change. Get the scoop on why so much sand moves during superstorms such as Hurricane Sandy, and learn about more than a century of efforts to stabilize the beaches along the Jersey Shore. New Jersey was bisected in 1664, when a boundary line was drawn from Little Egg Harbor to the Delaware River near the Water Gap so that this earth of majesty, this fortress built by Nature for herself, could be deeded by the Duke of York to Lord Berkeley and George Carteret. If you travel that line-the surveyors' pylons still stand-you traverse the physiographic provinces of New Jersey. You cross the Coastal Plain. You cross the Triassic Lowlands, a successor basin. You cross the Blue Ridge, crystalline hills. Now before you is the centerpiece of a limestone valley that runs south from New Jersey to Alabama and north from New Jersey into Canada-one valley, known to science as the Great Valley of the Appalachians and to local peoples here and there as Champlain, Shenandoah, Clinch River Valley, but in New Jersey by no special name, for in terrain so cornucopian one does not tend to notice a Shenandoah. A limestone valley is a white silo, a white barn, a sweep of ground so beautiful it should never end. You cross the broad valley. You rise now into the folded-and-faulted mountains, the eastern sinuous welt, the deformed Appalachians themselves. You are still in New Jersey.