Why New York's Skyline Looks Like it Does

New York's skyline boasts the extraordinary achievements of many of the world's greatest architects, but a closer look reveals that Mother Nature is the real star.

New York's skyline boasts the extraordinary achievements of many of the world's greatest architects, but a closer look reveals that Mother Nature is the real star.

To truly appreciate how it is that the city grew to become so big and tall, one should look down rather than up.

According to geologists, it's all about the Manhattan schist, an unassuming grey rock.

Said a professor from Hofstra University, "geology totally controls the skyline of New York, in that the higher buildings are always found where the rock is close to the surface".

That hard, dense strata developed about 300 million years ago when the earth's two land masses fused into one single continent.

We now call that continent Pangaea, and it managed to stick together for 100 million years.

During that time, New York was somewhere around the middle of it and buried beneath mountains as high as the Himalayas.

Manhattan as we know it today is located above the fragments left behind after the landmass split.

Thanks to the support provided by the schist underground, skyscrapers can dominate the airspace above.