Video Guide Continental Glaciation Night Of The Sun
M. Mustoe Geography

Abstract

What is wonderful about this film is its gentleness. It has beautiful photography and very easy and mild music. What is incredible about its content, however is the power of the geomorphological mechanisms it is discussing, that is, massive amounts of ice and, when this ice melts, the outflow water it produces. The video shows the incredible impact of Continental Glaciation on the Midwestern United States. These huge glaciers scoured the ground, leaving all kinds of interesting landform signatures as far south as Nebraska. Through periods of major changes in the atmosphere, continental glaciers advanced south during four major advances. These were named for the state they left their furthest influences in: The Nebraskan, Kansan, Illinoian, and Wisconsin. The film is about the Wisconsin period that began about 100 thousand years ago.

In the last 10,000 years and as far back as the Pleistocene Period about 5 ice lobes evolved out of the Wisconsin Advance. An ice sheet some 2 miles deep depressed the land with its weight and scoured the surface as it slowly advanced. This activity produced incredible amounts of deposition of rock flour in the Wisconsin River (200 feet deep) and it generated a region which is known today as the breadbasket of the United States because of the somewhat rocky but nevertheless productive soils this activity produced. Today (since 1971) the Ice Age Scientific Reserve is protecting this amazing region created by the ice sheets.

This video talks about the following places or regions:
Shiboigagin Marsh, Wisconsin
Nebraska, North Dakota
Kansas, Canada

Terms:
Sorting: boulders, rocks sand and silts....Finer materials pebble
Till:
Firn:
Drumlin, Drumlin Swarms steep up ice, taper gradually down ice
Kames
Moulin
Crevasse
Esker fast melting ice, speed
Kettle, Potholes
Moraine
Buttes
Ice Calving
Blue Ice Critical thickness, angle of repose