I never saw a ground hog growing up in the Pines. It was said that the soil was too sandy for them to burrow. They've only arrived along with with all the new construction, which provided suitable man-made habitat to dig under. In 1999, I stated looking for cracks in earnest to prove that permafrost existed in the Pine Barrens recent past. My first good find was next to the Mizpah fire tower, which I dug out only to learn that a ground hog beat me to it! The fissure was filled with loose windblown sand when the Pine Barrens was frozen and desert-like. The surrounding ground had dense soil called fragipan, much too hard for the ground hog to burrow in. This crack formed within an earlier structure composed of an even earlier frost crack that deformed during a previous permafrost thaw episode. We experienced multiple episodes of permafrost coming and going. My trowel marks the outside border of the thaw (thermokarst) modified wedge's wall.
A deformed Pleistocene sand-wedge cast (bright yellow sand) within an older structure, near Mizpah.
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