Nor was it known where they could be found in abundance. Deffeyes did imp01tant early work in the field. His doctoral dissertation, which dealt with two basins and two ranges in Nevada, included an appendix that started the zeolite industry. Certain zeolites (there are about thirty kinds) have become the predominant catalysts in use in oil refineries, doing a job that is otherwise assigned to platinum. Now, in Paterson, Deffeyes searched the roadcut vugs (as the minute caves are actually called) looking for zeolites. Some vugs were large enough to suggest the holes that lobsters hide in. They did indeed contain a number of white fibrous zeolite crystals-smooth and soapy, of a type that resembled talc or asbestos-but the cut had been almost entirely cleaned out by professional and amateur collectors, undeterred by the lethal traffic not many inches away. Nearly all the vugs were now as empty as they had been in zakelijke energie vergelijken their first hundred years. In the shale beyond the lava we saw the burrows of Triassic creatures. An ambulance from Totowa flew by with its siren wailing. We moved on a few miles into the Great Piece Meadows of the Passaic River Valley, flat as a lake floor, poorly drained land. A meadow in New Jersey is any wet spongy acreage where you don’t sink in above your chin. Great Piece Meadows, Troy Meadows, Black Meadows, the Great Swamp-Whippany, Parsippany, Madison, and Morristown are strewn among the reeds. The whole region, very evidently, was the bottom of a lake, for a lake itself is by definition a sign of poor drainage, an aneurysm in a river, a highly temporary feature on the land. Some lakes dry up. Others disappear after the outlet stream, deepening its valley and eroding headward into the outlet, empties the water. This one-Glacial Lake Passaic-vanished about ten thousand years ago, after the retreating glacier exposed what is now the Passaic Valley. The lake drained gradually into the new Passaic River, which fell a hundred feet into Glacial Lake Hackensack, and, en route, went over a waterfall that would one day in effect found the city of Paterson by turning its first mill wheel. At the time of its greatest extent, Lake Passaic was two hundred feet deep, thirty miles long, and ten miles wide, and seems to have been a scene of great beauty. Its zakelijke energie margins are still decorated with sand spits and offshore bars, wave-cut cliffs and stream deltas, set in suburban towns. The lake’s west shore was the worn-low escarpment of the Border Fault, and its most arresting feature was a hook-shaped basaltic peninsula that is now known to geologists as a part of the Third Watchung Lava Flow and to the people of New Jersey as Hook Mountain.