Inflow, outflow, and water levels in Lake Michigan during the last part of the Wisconsin glaciation
- Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey, Madison, WI (United States)
- Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, WI (United States). Dept. of Geology and Geophysics
Between about 14,000 and 10,000 B.P., water flowed to and from Lake Michigan through several channels connected with adjacent glacial lakes and the Mississippi basin. Inflow and outflow depend on lake-level fluctuations, but no known lake-level chronology for the Lake Michigan basin explains all the supposed facts. Several kinds of information can be use to construct such a chronology: elevations of beaches, elevations and locations of outlets, ice-margin positions, till stratigraphy, and glacial history relative to outlets and lake-sediment distribution. If the crustal rebound predicted by J.A. Clark (bracketed by glacial Lake Wisconsin and Door Peninsula water planes) is used as the basis for a lake-level chronology, lake elevations would have been much higher than previously recognized, beaches previously thought to be late glacial must be middle Holocene, and the predicted sequence of spillways from glacial Lake Oshkosh, in the Green Bay basin, to Lake Michigan seems incompatible with the till stratigraphy of the region. On the other hand, a hinge line model such as proposed by J.W. Goldthwait allows far less rebound than is required by their knowledge of present-day rebound and by the rebound interpreted from shore features of glacial Lake Wisconsin. Therefore major flaws exist in their understanding of the glacial chronology and stratigraphy, of the glacial lake deposits, or of the crustal rebound; the reconstructed of inflow and outflow will remain uncertain until these conflicts are resolved.
- OSTI ID:
- 5689795
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-921058-; CODEN: GAAPBC
- Journal Information:
- Geological Society of America, Abstracts with Programs; (United States), Vol. 24:7; Conference: 1992 annual meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA), Cincinnati, OH (United States), 26-29 Oct 1992; ISSN 0016-7592
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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