The rise and fall of the ridge

Recent data from heavy ion collisions at RHIC show unexpectedly large near-angle correlations that broaden longitudinally with centrality. The amplitude of this ridge-like correlation rises rapidly with centrality, reaches a maximum, and then falls in the most central collisions. In this talk we explain how this behavior can be easily understood in a picture where final momentum-space correlations are driven by initial coordinate space density fluctuations. We propose as a useful way to study these effects and explain what it tells us about the collision dynamics.