Hartford Basin Rift Modeler

The Hartford Basin is a rift valley located in Connecticut and Massachusetts. It formed roughly 220 million years ago during the Triassic period as the supercontinent Pangea broke apart.

As the crust stretched, a massive normal fault (the Eastern Border Fault) caused the land to drop, creating a half-graben valley. This valley filled with lakes and rivers.

During the Early Jurassic (approx. 200 million years ago), dinosaurs like Dilophosaurus walked along the muddy shores of these lakes, leaving footprints (ichnogenus Eubrontes).

Preservation: To be preserved until today, the footprints had to be covered by sediment, baked and buried deeply, then protected by hard volcanic rock (Central Atlantic Magmatic Province basalts). Finally, the entire sequence was tilted, and precise glacial erosion during the Pleistocene scraped off just enough top layers to expose the tracks at the surface in Rocky Hill, Connecticut.

NGSS Alignment (HS-ESS2-1)

This simulation develops a model to illustrate how Earth’s internal (rifting, volcanism) and surface processes (sedimentation, erosion) operate at different spatial and temporal scales to form continental features.