Today in my flvuial processes class, we’re going to discuss a great paper by Gran et al. on “Landscape evolution, valley excavation, and terrace development following abrupt postglacial baselevel fall.” The paper is set in a landscape I know well – southern Minnesota’s Minnesota River Basin. For my students in …
Cross-posted at Highly Allochthonous. There are some good comments there. I had the good fortune of going out in the woods a few days ago with colleagues here at Kent State University. We were in a second growth forest, probably fairly typical for this part of northeastern Ohio. The upland …
14,000 years ago there was direct connection between what is now the Red River basin and the Minnesota River basin. Today, there’s a continental divide – with the Red flowing toward Hudson Bay and the Minnesota flowing toward the Mississippi and Gulf of Mexico. But what a strange continental divide it is – for it runs through the former outlet of Lake Agassiz, in what is now known as the Traverse Gap. This divide is not so much a high point in the landscape, but a just-not-quite-as-low area.
For more than 55 million years, Ellesmere Island remained in one place while the world around it changed. Fifty-five million years ago, verdant forests grew at 75° North latitude. These wetland forests, [comprised] of species now primarily found in China, grew on an alluvial plain where channels meandered back and …