Finding on city's elevation is a low blow
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A week ago, I wrote parenthetically that Pittsburgh was at a higher elevation than Morgantown and touched off a new kind of backyard brawl.
My parenthetical claim generated more email and calls than all the other words in the column combined, and the questions went roughly this way: "Yo, Meriwether Lewis, do you think the Monongahela flows uphill?"
I don't. It's true that at the river's edge Pittsburgh is at a lower elevation than Morgantown. So what? Pittsburghers have hardly stuck by the riversides these past couple of hundred years.
Have you ever noticed how many city neighborhoods make direct or indirect reference to how high they are? Arlington Heights, the Bluff, Bon Air, Brighton Heights, Crafton Heights, Duquesne Heights, East Hills, Fineview, Highland Park, the Hill District, Mount Oliver, Mount Washington, Northview Heights, Observatory Hill, Polish Hill, the South Side Slopes, Spring Hill, Squirrel Hill, Stanton Heights, Summer Hill and Troy Hill.
The West Virginia city, less than one-fifth our size, hasn't climbed from its valley to the extent Pittsburgh has. So I was confident that the average Pittsburgher is higher than the average Morgantowner (excepting perhaps those occasions when the West Virginians are setting sofas on fire).
All the doubters had me wavering, though. Were all our hillside neighborhoods enough to boost us above the Mountaineers? Plenty of reference points on the Internet said Pittsburgh's elevation was higher, but there's an old saying in journalism: "When your mother says she loves you, check it out."
I called John A. Harper, manager of geologic resources for the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. Mr. Harper immediately restored my confidence.
Pittsburgh, he said, "is going to be higher in elevation, and I'll tell you why: Morgantown was built on one of the old Ice Age terraces, while Pittsburgh was built from the rivers to the top of the hills."
About all I know about the "Ice Age" is that Ray Romano, in his most demanding role, played the woolly mammoth. But Mr. Harper went on to explain that, before the Ice Age started about 900,000 years ago, there wasn't much difference in elevation between here and Morgantown.
The reason Troy Hill has a flat top, he said, is "that used to be the bottom of the Allegheny River. Oakland used to be the bottom of the Mon."
Back then, the Mon was the river, he said. It flowed north out of West Virginia, followed the path of what is now the Beaver River and didn't stop until it emptied into the St. Lawrence at what is now the Canadian border.
The glaciers, which came down from the North Pole and reached as far as Butler County, changed all the drainage patterns. They also increased the "relief," the distance between the highest and lowest points, because the glaciers' melting waters "scoured the rivers deeper," Mr. Harper said.
That wasn't the only effect. The Earth's crust isn't going to sink only where the ice is. Mr. Harper compared it to putting a bowling ball in the center of a water bed (which, I confess, I've never found occasion to do, not even when I was in a fraternity). The effects will be felt well beyond where the bowling ball sits.
I felt pretty good about Pittsburgh's relative height advantage after hearing the Big Bowling Ball Theory, but I still didn't have hard numbers. Daniel J. Bain, an assistant professor of geology and planetary science at the University of Pittsburgh, directed me to a U.S. Geological Survey website that supplies elevations for points in and around Pittsburgh and Morgantown.
There were about 200 elevation points listed for Pittsburgh and more than 40 for Morgantown. I averaged the elevation for the 29 fire stations tabulated in Pittsburgh and did the same for the three stations in Morgantown, figuring that would give a good geographic distribution for both places.
The Pittsburgh stations ranged from a high in Carrick (1,204 feet above sea level) to a low in the Strip (738 feet). With 13 stations above 1,000 feet, I was confident we had enough height to beat the three Morgantown stations that clocked in at 925, 922 and 1,158 feet.
That only shows how little I know about math. After checking and rechecking my math, the Pittsburgh stations averaged 968 feet and the Morgantown stations 1,001.
The Mountaineers beat us by 33 feet.
Damn you, Morgantown Fire Station No. 3 and your 1,158-foot height!
I hold out hope that Mr. Harper is right and the average Pittsburgher lives higher than the average Morgantown resident, but I haven't any data to prove it. I wish I'd just stuck with the Big Bowling Ball Theory.
First Published December 15, 2011 12:00 am
