Geology of the reading prong

For over a billion years the geological terrain now called New Jersey has been the site of unusually high uranium concentrations. Although the highest of these concentrations occurs in the Reading Prong, the area is itself only part of a larger geologic province extending to the northeast and southwest. The rocks in the Reading Prong are not uniformly radioactive. High uranium concentrations tend to be associated with magnetite deposits - metamorphic equivalents of iron-rich formations - and with pegmatites - rocks formed by precipitation from mineralizing solutions in the late phases of granite emplacement. Because of the way they were formed, the uranium-bearing magnetite and pegmatite bodies tend to be long and narrow, and the resulting patterns of radon occurrence can be expected to be the same. This may explain why, in some places, adjacent houses have very different radon concentrations