Bands of fens and treed levees formed over 1,000s of years since glaciers retreated at Michael's Bay on Lake Huron's Manitoulin Island, and at Bete Grise on Lake Superior's Keweenaw Peninsula. Filmed in 4k. McNeilFilms 2021.
Same here. I saw this kind of formation for the first time at Sleeping Bear Dunes Wilderness Area and also at Wilderness State Park. Makes me happy to finally know how they formed.
RU-vid just dropped this into my feed. Great explanation and beautiful photography. As a geologist who works and grew up in the southwest I never get enough GREEN. 😋 Thank you
You need to go to the UP just for the geology alone!! As a rock hound, I can't get enough. I should've become a geologist because I'm fascinated with how it all was formed.
When DeSoto went on his exploration into the SE portion of North America 1539-1543 he described all the rivers being iced over in this now moderate climate of Georgia and Tennessee. To the north you could imagine how much more colder it was in the Great Lakes region and it must have been an taiga landscape with Artic Circle extremes. So that was 482 years ago, just a blink of an eye in Geologic time.
@@JimbobZ17 The Cumberland should freeze over as it is at an elevation of 1,150ft above sea level. I think I read DeSotos description of the frozen rivers was present day Alabama Georgia line around modern day city of LaGrange. LaGrange is at 781ft elevation and 330 miles to the south.
I think the changes in shoreline may have something to due with the slow rebound of the land with the weight of the ice no longer pressing down on the Earths crust.
Definitley a factor. When the glaciers started to retreat the great lakes originally drained eastwards, following the path of the modern Nippissing, Petawawa and Ottawa Rivers. That part of the province is full of some interesting geology. Source: I'm a local yokel with an interest in how my home came to be.
I was at Michael’s Bay this past summer; just beautiful! I didn’t see the feature well at ground level-this is really handy to see the topo, satellite and details to go with it. I now want to go there in spring to see the fens in bloom. The water level has been high at Huron: two years prior we tried to hike the trail at Misery Bay to see the coastal alvars but they were quite submerged. Anyway, you have a new subscriber-the algorithm got me here and I’m happy it did!
Very very informative 👏every time I see or hear something on this internet I think how much history is being taught I'm 72 and just wish this was around when I was in school, again THANKS 😊
@@deadnorth8333 Probably melted during the Roman and Medieval Warming periods. Two of many things climate kooks don't know about while they call everybody else ignorant
80% of the last 140 centuries were warming than the 20th century. CO2 levels are insignificant because water vapor traps 98%+ the same infrared bandwidth as CO2. The solar cycle and precession are the main drivers of climate change.
@@mohamhead9701 The first inhabitants of the Great Lakes basin arrived about 10,000 years ago I also have evidence of such on land I own near Lake Michigan. The glaciers were all melted long before Roman times.
I grew up spending a lot of time in Huron, Ohio on Lake Erie. A few miles almost directly due south of my parent's summer place is Berlin Heights. It's on a ridge that runs east to west. I didn't find out until my 20s, from a geologist, that the shoreline was there a few thousand years ago. It makes sense in that the summer home is on a similar lakefront ridge today.
Thank you for this video. I've always been fascinated with the way shorelines look all along the Great Lakes, especially on Superior and around the area I live in Northern Michigan near Huron.
The lake level hasn’t been dropping the earth has been rising up. The earth around the Great Lakes was compressed so severely when the glaciers went over it that they have been rising back up ever since.
@zeddy mcdog, The climate changes every few months, and has my whole life, and I am 65 years old. So what the hell are you talking about, some shit you herd from the idiots on the TV. I'll let you in on a little secret they are not telling you the truth. Wise up and do some research before you shoot your mouth off.
Fantastic explanation of levees & fenns. I know the shoreline fairly extensively in two great lakes areas. Just south of Sleeping Bear Dunes on Lake Michigan and the south shore of Lake Superior west of Whitefish Pointe. The best example of these ridges and swales at Sleeping Bear is west of M-22, in the woods north and south of Boekelo Rd. Another example is west of Whitefish Point on Superior in the Vermillion Point area. The swales are deeper here and these small, long lakes are an incredible brook trout fishery. I always wondered how these lands formed this way. Your video has shown why. Both areas have sandy areas on the ridges well above the water line. Thanks for the awesome video.
I was thinking of Vermillion as I was watching this because Michael's Bay reminded me a lot of it. We were just up there at the end of October and I noticed the same formations as we drove through the trails to reach the old life saving station/nature preserve.
Very obvious on north coast of Ohio 2 ancient shorelines, Northridge (Rt. 20), Southridge (Rt. 84). Within a couple miles of separation the ground goes from sandy to tough gravel band to another sandy strip.
I live in lake in the hills Illinois very far north almost to the Wisconsin border and a fen is a property where water comes up out of the ground at about 55°, all winter it doesn't matter if it's minus 20° it will never freeze we have lakes up here that the geese flock to because it never freezes so I was good to hear the word fan f e n it's not a swamp swamp a stagnant water a fan is natural pure water coming up out of the ground like dig 😎
It would be very helpful to give the elevation changes between these shore line features. And if there is enough change there should be evidences all around all of these lakes.
These shore lines are partly the result of the land rising after the glaciers melted., not necessarily the water level going down. Of course it is a relative thing.
My 1970s conservation classes visited shoreline ridge areas of the great lakes and were taught the same...rising land ridges, not just water receding. Had friends build in 1960s on Lake Michigan shoreline in what we'd learned was sinking back then, come 2010 and even with low water levels they had waterfront property in their living room. Has me questioning timelines of a lot of geology.
Do the remnant shorelines rise in elevation the further one goes from the present day shoreline? If not then couldn't many of these features be from the slow buildup from wave or current sand and sediment deposition into sheltered locales?
I live in Indiana, south of Lake Michigan. I live on one of the old lakes shorelines, at the south junction of Rt.2 aka Belshaw Road. To the south of me there is another old shoreline, Rt.10. To my north, Rt.30 was one old shoreline and several miles north of there is 'Ridge road' which is another old shoreline. Each shoreline has lots of sand including some dunes, though most of them have been removed and hauled away to make room for business and housing development.
The land rose when the weight of the glaciers receded. I learned this in high school back in the early eighties, before the internet turned people into paranoid, anti-science conspiracy theorists.
@@RedArrow73 Can't believe anything you hear. I live out west. They constantly talk about the unprecedented droughts. The truth is these droughts are minor and common. Fortunately we have trees thousands of years old. So from tree ring data, 100 to 200 year droughts are the rule, not the exception. Scientists pushing global warming do NOT like the tree ring data.
How can one little place be a main source for copper? Is it so unusually dense with copper that it beats all other mines and if so.. does the lake have anything to do with that abundance?
Very interesting, lovely to see it from the drone! I wonder where the balance is struck between the Lake Water Receding, Vs the Ground Rebounding, Post-Glacier?
The south shore of Lake Michigan shows the succession of beaches with impressive dune and swale complexes, some captured in the Indiana Dunes National Park, others obliterated by industrialization and sand mining. To be fair some industrial organizations did save remnants by buying large tracts of land and only using a portion of it for their operations.
Yup, the great lakes, formerly shallow tropical seas, were formed by melting/ receding glaciers and unless there is another ice age, glaciers will continue to melt.😁
I'm a student of: both Larry Leventhal and the highly accomplished Minnesota geology x biology faculty that gave us our best understanding: Edward J. Cushing. The god Grover Maxwell taught us as no one else could. (He's dead now, but he gave us the tools to know that.)
My question is if those rifts are in fact due to glacial recession, and topical rebound is reality, then why is the supposed stone hedge of traverse bay under water?
I am not so sure that you are correct about the cause of the natural terracing there. The thing that stands out to me is the river that is beside the bay. So rather then the level of the great lakes dropping, those natural terraces could have formed from sediment from the river washing down to the lake in a big spring flood and then the lake waves washing that sediment back up onto the shore. Perhaps you are right though if the terraces are made of sand and not silt. I believe they would be silt terraces if they were primarily from river sediment.. Interesting video though. Thanks for sharing
Tom, they are sand, and there is a lot of literature on the former shorelines. The river did meander before the Mendota canal was dug, but its effect on the former shorelines was minimal.
So just like, what seems like everything else, there is absolute proof, using the naked eye that lake levels are no where's near record high levels like some say they are. Just that one statement, "the ruminants of 50 prior lake levels that clearly show that the great lakes were much much higher as well as, if we go back far enough, much much much lower.
Thank you for an intelligent discussion of the variability and change within nature ecological systems and geology without turning it into another climate alarmist example of how the world is being destroyed by man. Such conversations like this are hard to find on RU-vid these days.
We need to go back to early maps (15 and 1600's) and ask why the great Lakes were not even mapped. Chilaga (Chicago was there) I believe the Lakes are fairly recent .
You blame a 4 wheelers, for an invasive grass. That’s lame! This could be any number of reasons. How about wind? Maybe birds. Blame is a sorry excuse, for not knowing what your talking about. Thanks from.St. Paul Minnesota.
Yup. On Manitoulin it is suggested the phragmites got there due to the quad boogeyman, but at Beta Grise the remnant dune grass and sedges must have originally got there by some sort of Gaia-gasm.
