Tired of getting stuck in traffic jams as you try to “go down the ocean, hon”? Not a fan of crowded beaches and hot sand? Afraid to drive across the Bay Bridge? You can visit the ocean without leaving Baltimore and at the same time see evidence of our geological kinship with Europe.

Stony Run, a tributary stream of Jones Falls, runs along the fall line separating the Atlantic Coastal Plain and the Piedmont plateau. Its bed consists of various crystalline rocks, including Carroll Gneiss, a metavolcanic rock that formed through an eruption of magma in an oceanic environment some 470 million years ago. Four hundred to 600 hundred million years ago, the rocks of the surrounding area were beneath the Iapetus Ocean, which covered much of the Southern Hemisphere at the time. It was formed after the giant land mass known as Rodinia finally broke up 600 million years ago, and it is the precursor of the Atlantic Ocean as we now know it. In Greek mythology, Atlas is the son of Iapetus – hence the Atlantic Ocean taking the place of the Iapetus Ocean.

Granted, as you walk in the creek and the cold water chills your toes, you will not be lured by the siren-like smells of Thrasher’s french fries, suntan lotion, or Old Bay wafting from boardwalk crab feasts, but you will still see evidence of humanity’s common bond.

Stony Run, with its headwaters in North Baltimore, is one of several worldwide spots under study at Johns Hopkins University, proving the interconnection of North America with Norway, Scotland and Ireland. Samples of the same ocean-underlying rock are found in all three places. Geologists date specimens from each location to track the tectonic processes that played out in this long-gone setting. This research provides support for the case that these areas were connected during the Pangea supercontinent era.

On a recent Sunday morning, two dozen fortunate folks received a boots-on-the-ground and hands-on-the-rocks geology lesson sponsored by the Friends of Stony Run. Our instructors included Johns Hopkins professor Daniel Viete, Martin F. Schmidt, author of “Maryland’s Geology,” and James Wolf, president of Friends of Stony Run. With their guidance we could see where tectonic plate collisions caused rocks to fold over themselves. The hinges and folds of these rocks were — pun intended — rock-solid, but the nearby pegmatite crumbled in our hands with little effort. Though the Iapetus Ocean died, due to a process called subduction in which dense, oceanic crust sinks back into the earth’s mantle, some pieces of pegmatite were thrust up and preserved for study for experts and amateurs alike.

Subduction ultimately kills all oceans. Fortunately for us, this occurs on a geologic time scale of millions of years, so there is still plenty of time to go to Ocean City if you would rather feel the sand on your feet than the cool waters of Stony Run. As you do, however, remember from whence we came. Humanity has had a greatly accelerated impact on Earth in the roughly 300,000 years of our existence; we operate at warp speed compared with plate tectonics. There may be nothing we can do to stop the shifting of continents, but it’s up to us to determine what life on this planet looks like tomorrow and for future generations.

Carl R. Gold (cgold@carlgoldlaw.com) is a Maryland Master Naturalist.