Science Cafe: A Glacial Legacy

Posted Monday, March 8, 2010

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We often take the landscape for granted, but have you ever wondered, say, where Lake Erie actually comes from? Or why the Cuyahoga River nearly makes a 180 degree turn in Akron? To find the answer you have two choices: go back in time about 14-thousand years and watch a glacier, or tune in Monday morning at 9. A local geology professor joins host Dan Moulthrop for a Science Cafe explaining such mysteries as what put the ridge in Center Ridge Road and why we owe our settlement patterns to a glacier named for the state of Wisconsin.

Guests

Dr. John Szabo, Professor of Pleistocene Studies, Geomorphology, Environmental Geology, Groundwater Hydrology, University of Akron

Please follow our community discussion rules when composing your comments.

Tom Bunch 10:41 AM 3/8/10

I always wondered how Clifton Gorge formed south of Springfield, Ohio. The land around there is so flat an in the middle of this area this deep gorge appears.

Please explain.

michelle 10:45 AM 3/8/10

How will global warming impact Lake Erie and local watersheds?

Kent Cicerchi 10:48 AM 3/8/10

What caused the dark soil in the mucklands in Celeryville, Ohio?

Kent (Brooklyn)

Don 10:55 AM 3/8/10

Perhaps John could touch on glacio-isostasy, tilting of the beach ridges and neotectonics.

cristin 11:10 AM 3/8/10

THAT was a fantastic program!

Szabo to Bunch 12:12 PM 3/9/10

I don’t know the specific area, but I would think that the gorge may have been created by meltwater draining into the ancestral Miami R. system. Sometimes parts of these features are cut at different times, covered by younger deposits and exhumed by modern rivers.

Szabo to Michelle 12:15 PM 3/9/10

The model currently predicts that in 100 years we will be 7 degrees warmer and a little wetter (winter). Rainfall may be more intense, but evaporation will be greater. This would reduce water levels in the Great Lakes.

Szabo to Kent 12:17 PM 3/9/10

Celeryville is in the bed of glacial Lake Willard, a lake that formed between two end moraines. The lake drained eventually, but the poorly drained sediments allowed a swamped to form by about 11,000 years ago. We have a radiocarbon date of about 11,000 on the log of a northern white cedar, a boreal forest tree,

Szabo to Don 12:20 PM 3/9/10

Cleveland has experienced a small amount of rebound, effectively 0 in terms of feet. The hingeline for the rebound is east of Cleveland where the beach ridges rise in elevation going towards NY.