CAPE COD GEOLOGY 



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land, as they are now. Here, as on Block Island, where the original forest was 

 cut away by white men for fuel or for timber, trees cannot survive except in 

 the lee of some protective barrier of lower, hardier bushes, or of hills. 



Cuttyhunk now consists of a central round hill of glacial drift, which rises 

 136 feet above the sea in its highest morainic knobs and ridges. These are 

 flanked on the southwest by a lower mass of glacial drift, which has a different 

 contour and has been much cut away by the sea on the south and west. An 

 extension of this drift forms a barrier beach enclosing West End Pond, near 

 the western shore of which lies the small islet on which Captain Gosnold at- 

 tempted to form a settlement. Another low glacial deposit that lies northeast 

 of the central mass of the island would form a separate island were it not for 

 the bar that ties it to the main mass. Hooked spits that stretch out from the 

 shore partly enclose a salt lagoon known as Cuttyhunk Pond. The bar or 

 barrier beach on the south side of this pond extends from Cuttyhunk toward 

 Nashawena and ends in a small mass of drift that borders Canapitsit channel. 



The central round morainal hill of the island bears ridges that trend in 

 the general direction of the group of islands and that consequently lie nearly 

 parallel to the old ice fronts along which they were formed, either by pressure 

 and displacement of the underlying beds or by the formation of frontal deposits. 

 Many of the depressions here culminate in kettle holes, most of which contain 

 small swamps. 



The morainal ridges in the lower drift surface, which lies south and west 

 of the main mass of the island and extends to its west end, rise to a height of 

 60 feet. These ridges front the south coast and show by their general rise in 

 that direction that the land once extended a quarter of a mile seaward from 

 the present cliffs. The detached deposit of drift in the northeastern part of 

 the island rises to a height of about 50 feet and shows gently swelling glacial 

 contours. In Gosnold's time this land appears to have been connected with 

 the western part of the island by a bar, as it now is, and to have been the place 

 referred to by Brereton as the bivouac of the savages described by him as 

 ' 'every night retiring themselves to the furthermost part of our island, two or 

 three miles from our fort." 



Geological Structure 



The geological structure of Cuttyhunk is like that of the islands immedi- 

 ately northeast of it. Beneath the surficial morainal deposits of Wisconsin drift, 

 which in places reach a thickness of 15 feet, and which bear scattered blocks of 



