Category Archives: Geology

Geology of the Lake Champlain region

Geologist Sees Sea Where Lake Champlain Now Flows

Geologist Sees Sea Where Lake Now Flows

Geologist Sees Sea Where Lake Now Flows

John Rayburn,
SUNY New Paltz
environmental geologist

Although it’s not as exciting as spying the Lake Champlain monster, the discovery of bones from a prehistoric seal in the bed of a former inland sea in the Lake Champlain Valley should intrigue anyone interested in New York state’s natural history.

John Rayburn, a SUNY New Paltz environmental geologist, will share his research findings during a visit to the SUNY Cortland campus on Tuesday, Sept. 25.

Rayburn, a specialist in glacial geology, geomorphology and paleoclimate studies, will discuss “The Champlain Sea: A Record of Marine Conditions in the Lake Champlain Valley” at 7 p.m. in Brockway Hall Jacobus Lounge.

The event continues the Geology Department’s ongoing speaker series that has run for a number of years. The talks are free and open to the public.

While today’s Lake Champlain Valley contains a most impressive long lake, in prehistoric times an inland sea dominated that same region, according to Rayburn.

The marine embayment developed in northern New York around 12,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age, Rayburn explained. The weight of the Laurentide Ice Sheet had pressed the entire surface of the earth downwards over the preceding millennia and, as the edge of the ice retreated northwards, salt water was able to flood along the Saint Lawrence Seaway and enter the Champlain Valley.

“The evidence is in the sediments,” Rayburn said. “Marine shells are found in clay deposits throughout the region for this time, and bones of a marine seal also have been found.”

Rayburn has spent the past 14 years documenting the timing and causes of the Champlain Sea event using sediment cores and shoreline deposits. His work has shown the linkage between catastrophic floods from ice-dammed lakes in the Ontario basin and changes in lake and sea levels in the Champlain Valley. These floods reshaped much of the landscape of northern New York and may have influenced circulation of the North Atlantic Ocean and global climate.

David Barclay, a SUNY Cortland associate professor of geology, noted that the College’s own Brauer Education Center in Selkirk, N.Y., is located south of the area flooded by the Champlain Sea.

“However, some of the glacial lakes that were in the Champlain Valley extended south into the Albany and Brauer area, and the catastrophic floods swept all the way down the Hudson Valley and out past what is now New York City,” noted Barclay, who leads geology field trips to the area for his Supplemental Field Studies class.

Rayburn and Barclay are conducting ongoing research in the Champlain Valley using tree rings to model regional climate change.

Rayburn joined SUNY New Paltz’s Geological Sciences Department in 2007 as an assistant professor. He teaches courses within the Geological Sciences and Environmental Geochemical Science programs.

He earned a Ph.D. at Binghamton University, where he was a graduate fellow and teaching assistant. He received an M.Sc. in geology from University of Manitoba. Rayburn completed a bachelor’s degree in geology at SUNY Plattsburgh and another in economics from St. Lawrence University. He completed a research fellowship with the U.S. Department of the Interior’s U.S. Geological Survey in Reston, Va.

Previously, as a Mendenhall Fellow at the United States Geological Survey, Rayburn conducted research on the record and mechanisms of abrupt climate change.

Since 2008, he has edited the New York Glaciogram, an informal newsletter of shared geology information in New York state. He is a co-principal investigator of a study that involves undergraduate student researchers titled “A Comprehensive Approach to Watershed Characterization Focusing on the Source of New York City Water.” The program is funded by the National Science Foundation.

The series is sponsored by the Geology Department, the Geology Club, Campus Artists and Lecture Series and the student activity fee.

For more information, contact Barclay at (607) 753-2921.

Whales in Lake Champlain?

The Charlotte Whale

In August 1849, a work-crew digging a railroad bed in Charlotte, Vermont unearthed a skull and a batch of bones that were first thought to be the remains of an ox or horse, or some other large familiar creature. Indeed it was a large creature… a whale – discovered in 8 feet of clay a mile from the shore of freshwater Lake Champlain.

whales in Lake Champlain?

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The bones were turned over to a Vermont natural scientist named Zadock Thompson, who with help from Harvard University, identified the skeleton as a 14-foot, 11,000-year-old beluga whale, an important discovery that confirmed evidence that ocean waters had once covered the area.

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UVM Perkins’ Museum

whales in Lake Champlain

The whale skeleton, later reconstructed with wires by Thompson, is now housed in a glass display case for all to see at the UVM Perkins Geology Museum. The whale and a helpful inscription tell about continental glaciers, changing climates, and evolving sea and land formations. A visitor can’t help but imagine the puzzlement of the laborers when they uncovered the whale, the excitement of Thompson as he pieced together the skeletal puzzle, and more to the point: how dramatically the landscape and flora and fauna of the region have changed over 11,000 years.

What can we learn from the Charlotte whale? That some 24,000 years ago a continental glacier covered the area with ice a mile deep. As the earth’s climate warmed, the glacier receded north, and that roughly 13,000 years ago the ice had disappeared enough to allow ocean water to flow into the region. That sometime during that period the whale died and ocean waters began receding, eventually disappearing, as the once glacier-depressed land mass rose.

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Modern Day Vermont Whales

Modern day whales in Vermont are limited to the Charlotte whale’s skeleton and the Whale Tails sculpture alongside the northbound lanes of Interstate 89 in South Burlington. Click here to learn about the Whale Tails sculpture.

 

whales in Lake Champlain

Whale Tails alongside I-89 in South Burlington, VT

 

The Charlotte Whale can be seen at:

Perkins Geology Museum, Delehanty Hall, University of Vermont, 180 Colchester Ave., Burlington, VT 05401, 802-656-8694    www.uvm.edu/perkins/   Mon-Fri 8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Admission free.

Rock, minerals, fossils, dinosaur bones and an 11,000-year-old whale skeleton!

More About This:

Lake Champlain Geology

Whale Tails in Vermont Field

Charlotte Whale

The Vermont State Fossil

Charlotte, The Vermont Whale

 

Lake Champlain Geology

Lake Champlain Geology- present

Lake Champlain Geology- present

Lake Champlain is located on the Champlain Valley between the Green Mountains of Vermont and the Adirondack Mountains of New York state. It flows north and is drained by the Richelieu River, which in turn flows into the Saint Lawrence River at Sorel-Tracy, Quebec. Lake Champlain’s major feeders are Otter Creek, the Winooski, Lamoille and Missisquoi Rivers in Vermont and New York’s Ausable, Chazy, Boquet and Saranac Rivers. Lake Champlain also receives water from the 32 (51 km) mile long Lake George via the LaChute River. This means that Lake Champlain receives water not only from the northwestern slopes of the Green Mountains and the northeastern peaks of the Adirondacks, but it also drains the north and west slopes of Massachusetts’ Berkshire Mountains. Lake Champlain is connected to the Hudson River by the Champlain Canal.

Lake Champlain’s geology is very interesting. The Champlain Valley is considered part of the Great Appalachian Valley, which reaches from Quebec to Alabama. It is a physiographic section (geomorphic, or physiographic, regions are broad-scale subdivisions based on terrain texture, rock type, and geologic structure and history) of the Saint Lawrence Valley, which is, in turn, part of the larger Appalachian physiographic division.

Lake Champlain is one of many large lakes that are found in an arc from Labrador through the northern United States and into the Northwest Territories of Canada.  Although smaller than any of the Great Lakes, it is the largest freshwater lake in North America after the Great Lakes. Lake Champlain typically varies seasonally from 95 to 101 feet (29 to 30 m) above mean sea level.

Lake Champlain Geology- 12,000 years ago
Lake Champlain Geology- 12,000 years ago

Between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago the Champlain Basin was part of a great inland sea that was a temporary inlet of the Atlantic Ocean, a para-tropical sub sea, or epeiric sea, called the Champlain Sea. It was created by the retreating glaciers during the close of the last ice age. The Sea once included lands in what are now the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario, as well as parts of the American states of New York and Vermont. This sea extended to the west of present day Ottawa, Ontario in Canada.

Modern evidence of the sea can be seen in the form of whale fossils, (beluga, fin whales and bowhead whales) and marine shells that have been found in Vermont  and near the cities of Ottawa, Ontario, and Montreal,  Quebec, the existence of ancient shorelines in the former coastal regions, and the presence of Leda clay deposits dotting the region. From Mount Pakenham, Ontario, the viewable ancient coastline to the northeast is roughly 25 miles (40 km) away and is known today as the Eardley Escarpment; part of the Gatineau Hills in the province of Quebec.