It looks like just another hill in Sussex County, but you wouldn't have wanted to have been standing there 420 million years ago.
That's about when the Beemerville Volcano erupted in Wantage, give or take six million years, according to geologists.
So much about New Jersey is familiar -- the Jersey Shore, traffic jug handles, diners. Far less known is there was a time, nearly 200 million years before dinosaurs first roamed the Earth, when a volcanic eruption reshaped the landscape.
"You don't typically think of New Jersey as volcanoes. We're not Iceland, we're not Hawaii. But we do have a very unique geologic history," said Steve Domber, New Jersey's state geologist.
The crater is long gone. All that remains of the Beemerville Volcano is a volcanic neck that stretches 1,020 feet into the sky. It is largely covered by trees, but there are several homes.
It is the only volcanic edifice that remains in New Jersey, Domber said.
The Beemerville Volcano gets its name from a section of Wantage, but also is known as Rutan Hill. Space Farms Zoo and Museum, the region's best-known business, is located about four miles to the south. New Jersey's highest elevation, site of the High Point Monument, is seven miles to the north.
NJ Advance Media posed some questions about the volcano to Domber and Jeremy Weremeichik, a geologist with the state Department of Environmental Protection, in a Zoom interview and both responded to followup questions via a joint email.
No -- at least not in the next several hundred million years.
Volcanos are classified as active, dormant or extinct, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The Beermerville Volcano falls into the extinct category, Domber and Weremeichik said in an email.
None of the 169 active volcanos in the U.S. are anywhere near New Jersey. More than 50 are in Alaska.
"The geologic forces that generated volcanoes in the eastern United States millions of years ago no longer exist. Through plate tectonics, the eastern U.S. has been isolated from the global tectonic features (tectonic plate boundaries and hot spots in the mantle), that cause volcanic activity. So new volcanic activity is not possible now or in the near future," the geological survey says on its website.
However, the U.S. Geological Survey didn't completely shut the door on a volcano eruption. "If you wait around several hundred million years, maybe," the site said.
Sure, why not? The remains of Beemerville Volcano offers some of the best views in northwestern New Jersey. At least that's what we are told.
There are private homes in the area, but no public lands.
"This is not a park. This is not publicly accessible," Domber said.
A teacher spoke with The Star-Ledger in 2005 about buying a five-acre lot at the site, two decades earlier, before realizing that the stellar views that captivated her were from the top of a volcano.
She checked with the U.S. Geological Survey before proceeding with building her house.
What sealed the deal, she explained, was learning it had not erupted in more than 400 million years.
"I'm comfortable with that," she told the newspaper.
A volcanic neck, like the one in New Jersey, is defined by the National Park Service as the solidified remains of a volcano's conduit and plumbing system that endures after the rest of the volcano has faded away.
There are volcanic necks, sometimes referred to as volcanic plugs, around the country. They can be found within at least 10 national parks, including the Grand Canyon.
New Jersey's volcano was discovered around the turn of the 20th century, but no one seems to know an exact date.
"We are uncertain exactly when or how the volcanic origins of the area were first identified, but some of the earliest geologic work on the Beemerville Volcanic Complex dates to the early 1900s, Domber and Weremeichik said in an email.
Again, there's some uncertainty.
Nepheline syenite, a rock, is in the area. The only other places it is found in the United States is in Texas and Arkansas.
Whether the presence of the rock is the result of volcanic ash or flow from 420 million ago is impossible to know, the geologists said.
"Nepheline syenite is present and part of the Beemerville Volcanic Complex, but we are uncertain about the type of eruptive material produced since there are no accounts of volcanic ash or flows that come from Rutan Hill," Domber and Weremeichik said in an email.
"Geologists are always looking for modern-day analogs to explain the things we see in the geologic record. Like almost all of the geology we have in New Jersey, the presence of the Beemerville Volcanic Complex reminds us that on geologic timescales New Jersey looked a lot different than it does today," Domber said.
"Where we are standing now at one time could have been on the top of a mountain range, under the ocean, covered by ice, or walked on by dinosaurs. Geology provides us a historical view of the world that extends well beyond humans," Domber said.