“New York has more hermits than will be found in all the forests, mountains and deserts of the United States”

Secrets of the Deep

What lies beneath the surface of New York Harbor? For starters, a 350-foot steamship, 1,600 bars of silver, a freight train, and four-foot-long cement-eating worms.

The steady transformation of New York’s waterfront from wasteland to playground means more New Yorkers are spending time along the city’s edge. That can lead a person to wonder: What, exactly, is down there? Until recently, The People of New York had patchy knowledge of what lies beneath the surface of one of the world’s busiest harbors. What they did know came largely from random anecdotes, and depth soundings done the way Henry Hudson did them—by rope and lead sinker. This first GPS-era picture comes from the team at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who have methodically swept the lower Hudson with state-of-the-art sonar. LDEO’s Dr. Frank Nitsche stitched together their data, along with several other researchers’ work, into this elegant color-keyed map, which they supplemented by talking with sea captains, historians, and the divers pictured . There’s a whole other city down there...

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