Genesee River

The Genesee River is a tributary of Lake Ontario flowing northward through the Twin Tiers of Pennsylvania and New York in the United States.The river provided the original power for the Rochester area's 19th century mills and still provides hydroelectric power for downtown Rochester.GeologyThe Genesee is the remaining western branch of a preglacial system, with rock layers tilted an average of 40 feet (12 m) per mile, so the river flows across progressively older bedrock as it flows northward. It begins in exposing the Allegheny Plateau's characteristic conglomerates: sandstones and shales in the of the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian subperiods. Thereafter, further downstream as it traverses the area known as The Grand Canyon of the East, where it falls (three times) through over 600 feet (180 m) as to passes through the gorges in New York's Letchworth State Park, the river also often exposes older rocks such as shales (some rich in hydrocarbons), siltstones and some limestones of the Devonian period at Letchworth and, at other canyons with three more waterfalls at Rochester cuts through the Niagara Escarpment exposing limestones and shales of Silurian age in the rock column. With cuttings in the geologic record showing so many early ages, the river area has a great variety of fossils for paleobiological and stratigraphic analysis.