Lake Whittlesey
Lake Whittlesey was a
The strip of Lake bottom between the Whittlesey and Warren beaches in southeastern Michigan is largely a clayey plain, the principal exceptions being at deltas of Lake Arkona. The deltas of streams entering Lake Whittlesey are less conspicuous than of the same streams in connection with its predecessor, Lake Arkona. One reason for this is the fact that the rise of water caused estuarine conditions for some distance up the valleys beyond the Whittlesey beach, and it was necessary to fill these estuaries from their heads down-stream past the beach before the lake-bed proper would receive a coating of delta material.[1] Frank Taylor named this body of water, Lake Whittlesey in 1897, in honour of Charles Whittlesey.[2] The lake created the Belmore beach of the Erie-Huron basin. It flowed across the "thumb" of Michigan, through an outlet known as the Ubly outlet.[3]
Deltas
In New York there is one delta, which is a deposit in Lake Whittlesey. It buries the eastward ends of the Arkona beach ridges a mile or two east of Alden. The river, which built this delta, flowed westward along the front of the ice when the front was on the Alden moraine. It flowed in a valley, which had not been deepened during the time of Lake Arkona, and it is therefore an exception to the inset deltas of Lake Whittlesey. This delta is not large, but its relation to the Arkona beaches establishes the time at which it was built.[4] In
Correlatives
During the time of Lake Whittlesey Lake Saginaw was an independent lake and after receiving the overflow of Lake Whittlesey it discharged into Lake Chicago, which had then attained hardly half its greatest extent. Two small narrow lakes probably stood in front of the Green Bay ice lobe, but according to Mr. Leverett there was still free drainage and no lakes at the west end of the Lake Superior basin. In New York Fairchild finds Lake Newberry to be the correlative of Lake Whittlesey, but Lake Newberry discharged southward to Susquehanna River. A river of some size entered Lake Whittlesey northeast of Alden, New York, and built a delta which buried the Arkona beaches.[4]
Transitory to Lake Arkona
In falling from the level of Lake Whittlesey to that of Lake Wayne the water level necessarily passed the planes at which it had stood in making the Arkona beaches, and Lake Arkona was temporarily revived. But this relation was transitory and endured for so short a time that no evidence of renewed wave work has been found.[4]
See also
Proglacial lakes of the Lake Erie Basin
- Lake Maumee
- Lake Arkona
- Lake Wayne
- Lake Whittlesey
- Lake Warren
- Lake Grasmere
- Early Lake Algonquin
- Lake Lundy and Dana
- Early Lake Erie
- Lake Erie
References
- ^ a b c Publication 9. Geological Series 7; Surface Geology and Agricultural Conditions of the Southern Peninsula of Michigan; Frank Leverett with a Chapter on Climate by C. F. Schneider;Michigan Geological and Biological Survey Lansing Michigan; 1911
- CiteSeerX 10.1.1.629.7638.
- ^ Chapter XV.; The Glacial Lake Whittlesey; Frank Taylor; Glacial Formations and Drainage Features Erie and Ohio Basins; Chapter XV, The Glacial Lake Whittlesey; Frank Leverett; Government Printing Office; Washington, D.C.; 1902; pg 741-757
- ^ a b c d e f Chapter XVII; Glacial Lake Whittlesey; Frank Taylor; The Pleistocene of Indiana and Michigan, History of the Great Lakes; Monographs of the United States Geological Survey, Vol. LIII; Frank Leverett and Frank B. Taylor; Washington, D.C,; Government Printing Office; 1915