THE CATSKILL GEOLOGISTS BY PROFESSORS ROBERT AND JOHANNA TITUS - The First Sunrise

We, all of us, have from time to time stayed up so late or awoken so early as to see the sunrise. It’s a wondrous experience. This was a virtual institution at the Catskill Mountain House Hotel. Every morning, hotel guests congregated on the hotel’s front porch to watch the sun rising above the Taconic Mountains. See our first illustration. Frederic Church painted that view. See our second image. The two of us once camped out nearby so that we could get up and go see this legendary sight. 

It’s only natural for a geologist to ponder the fact that tomorrow will see another sunrise and the day after that one more. There will be another and then another on into a very distant future. Will there ever be a last sunrise? Think about that for a moment. And then, what about the past? There was a sunrise yesterday and the day before. And before . . .  and before . . .  and before. Here’s a thought, was there a first sunrise? How could that have possibly been? But – how could that not have been? We think we can imagine that. Let’s go and see.

We are the mind’s eyes. It’s April 2nd, 4,602,941 BC – a Tuesday. Let’s hover in space two light minutes above our solar system during its earliest times. We look down upon it. In the center is a mass of dust and gas which is not our sun, but something called a protostar. It’s dark and dense with increasing masses of matter, mostly hydrogen, raining down upon - and then into it. As that enormous mass accumulates, gravity pulls it all towards an increasingly dense center. Under all this intense pressure those hydrogens begin fusing with each other and turning into helium. This generates heat and that protosun eventually reaches a very high temperature. It should be glowing, but the dust blots out the light.

Now we turn a full 360 degrees while looking down at an enormous disk that surrounds our protosun. At various distances there are smaller masses called protoplanets. We drop down onto the third one; it’s going to, in time, become our Planet Earth. We land on the exact longitude and latitude that will someday be the Mountain House site. Our proto-Earth is revolving, and we watch the setting of the protosun. That’s not easy in the blackness of this unlit early solar system.

Over “night” the temperature of the protosun keeps rising until it reaches a critical stage. Now, more and more hydrogen atoms continue fusing with each other and that adds just a little more heat - just enough. That begins an ignition of what was a proto-star and is now quickly becoming the real thing – the star we call our Sun. The blast blows away all the dust and the sun lights up.

Hours pass, the proto-Earth continues to spin, carrying with it the Mountain House site. And then, for the very first time in history, the Sun rises over the horizon that faces the location where someday the Catskill Mountain House porch will be. 

And we were there to see it.

Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.” Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.com,”