Northeast Friends of the Pleistocene June 5-7, 2015 Field Trip
The 78th Annual Reunion of the Friends of the Pleistocene was head-quartered in Rocky Hill, Connecticut at Dinosaur State Park. The meeting was co-sponsored by the Geological Society of Connecticut and the Connecticut Geological and Natural History Survey.
The fieldtrip “Glacial Lake Hitchcock and the Sea” was led by Janet Stone, Jack Ridge, Ralph Lewis, and Mary DiGiacomo-Cohen. The 2015 gathering was held in Connecticut for the first time since 1935 when Richard Foster Flint hosted the 2 annual FOP fieldtrip at New Haven, and stops included the Hartford Clay of Glacial Lake Hitchcock (at that time unnamed). Eighty years later, attendees realized there is more to learn about Lake Hitchcock in Connecticut, thanks to geologists like Richard Lougee, who understood early on why this lake existed, and in 1935 he gave it the name of Glacial Lake Hitchcock, and Ernst Antevs, who in the 1920’s gave us the powerful chronologic tool of varve correlation. In recent years, the compilation of many detailed on-land mapping studies and high-resolution offshore mapping (Stone and others, 2005), and recent calibration of the North American Varve Chronology (Ridge, J.C., 2014) have provided many new insights.
The fieldtrip demonstrated evidence for the close connection of Lake Hitchcock levels with the position of sea level in Long Island Sound via the lower Connecticut River valley, and explain important offshore features like a -40-m marine delta, and the altitudes of the Race spillway cut through the Harbor Hill moraine and Block Channel spillway cut through the terminal moraine. The history of lake levels and knowledge of eustatic sea levels provided by the Barbados sea level curve (Bard and others, 1991) has implications for the magnitude of glacio-isostatic depression and the timing of rebound. Trip leaders also reviewed recent refinements to the timing of ice retreat through the region as a result of recent coring of varves and the newly calibrated North American Varve Chronology.
The fieldtrip demonstrated evidence for the close connection of Lake Hitchcock levels with the position of sea level in Long Island Sound via the lower Connecticut River valley, and explain important offshore features like a -40-m marine delta, and the altitudes of the Race spillway cut through the Harbor Hill moraine and Block Channel spillway cut through the terminal moraine. The history of lake levels and knowledge of eustatic sea levels provided by the Barbados sea level curve (Bard and others, 1991) has implications for the magnitude of glacio-isostatic depression and the timing of rebound. Trip leaders also reviewed recent refinements to the timing of ice retreat through the region as a result of recent coring of varves and the newly calibrated North American Varve Chronology.
