The Hudson River Is Not What You Think

The Hudson River flows both ways. In January 2009, the ebb tide carried the Miracle on the Hudson plane, US Airways Flight 1549, about four miles south. The lower Hudson isn’t really a river. It’s a fjord. Ice age glaciers carved this valley hundreds of feet below sea level. When the ice melted, the Atlantic flooded back in, so the ocean tide still reaches more than 150 miles inland to the Federal Dam at Troy. The Lenape name for it, Muhheakantuck, is usually translated as “the river that flows both ways.”