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Home , Ice age, Illinoian (stage), Interglacial, Last Glacial Maximum, Proglacial lake, Sangamonian

Kansas Geological Survey Public Information Circular 28 • April 2009 Revised November 2020 in Kansas Shane A. Lyle, Kansas Geological Survey Revised by Anthony L. Layzell, Kansas Geological Survey

Introduction Yellowstone National Park area were During each stage, many smaller, Melting glaciers in ’s polar and deposited throughout the state. regional lobes of locally advanced alpine regions are beacons of During the , - and retreated (fig. 2). The Pre- change. To better understand what sized ice sheets formed in different parts Stage included many glacial and is happening today, it is helpful to of the world: , Greenland, stages, with 11 distinct consider past glaciation and climate- Eurasia, , the , and glacial stages currently recognized. The change examples. Glaciers seemingly . Ice sheets in the polar regions was a warm interglacial couldn’t be further removed from the and Greenland were fairly stable, but stage of ice retreat. hot summers and windswept of other areas, including North America, At its peak, Pre-Illinoian ice covered Kansas. However, in the not-so-distant saw repeated expansion and contraction more than one-third of North America geologic past, glaciers repeatedly in response to fluctuating (fig. and extended into northeastern advanced across the Midwest and at 1). These successive glacial advances Kansas. In Kansas, at least two separate least twice reached northeast Kansas. As and retreats are known as glacial stages glacial advances took place, first from the ice progressed across the continent, and interglacial stages, respectively. and later from the Dakota the landscape, climate, plants, and In North America, geologists regions. Ice lobes dammed the ancestral animals all changed. recognize four stages. They are the Pre- Kansas River in several places and The purpose of this public Illinoian (2.6 million–191,000 ago), crept over the locations of present-day information circular is to show how Illinoian (191,000–130,000 years ago), Topeka, Lawrence, and downtown Kansas was literally on the forefront of Sangamonian (130,000–71,000 years Kansas City (fig. 2). when a continental ice ago), and Wisconsinan (71,000–11,700 At its maximum, Illinoian ice covered sheet last extended into the northeast years ago). most of and did not enter corner of the state about 700,000 years ago. The geologic sciences are uniquely capable of describing these events, in that geologists nearly always look back in time to understand our current climate and environment. This publication provides insight into how the Midwest was affected by repeated continent-sized glacial advances during the Pleistocene Epoch. It explains glaciation in Kansas and the ecological and climate response since the last retreat. The Pleistocene provides an important analog, or past example, to better understand some of the concepts associated with climate change.

The Pleistocene The Pleistocene Epoch lasted from about 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago. Although commonly referred to as the , the Pleistocene encompassed many glacial and interglacial events and warm and cool climates. It was also a period of volcanic activity in North America and along the North and South American Pacific coasts. In Kansas, at Figure 1. Extent of glaciation in North America. Solid white areas represent Late Wisconsinan ice least three large ash falls from volcanoes sheets and glaciers. Dotted white line indicates maximum extent of older glaciations. in , New Mexico, or the © 2013 Geosystems Inc. past Tarkio and Chillicothe, Missouri, ice limit into the present-day Pre-Illinoian ice limit (fig. 2). The Big and Little Blue rivers in Unglaciated area Marshall and Pottawatomie counties probably developed as ice-margin streams or spillways to a proglacial , a lake formed just beyond the frontal margin of a , near Atchison. Advancing ice also buried ancestral rivers that once flowed east through Marshall, Nemaha, Jackson, Brown, Atchison, and Doniphan counties in northeastern Kansas. Some of these valleys were more than 3 miles (4.8 km) wide, 400 feet (122 m) deep, and 75 miles (121 km) long. These buried valleys are now important groundwater sources for agriculture and industry in an area that otherwise does not have much groundwater. When the ice flow reached a depression such as the Kansas River, it spilled over the side, slowly filled the , then flowed over the opposite side. The ice was perhaps 300 feet (91 m) thick north of the river near Wamego and 500 feet (153 m) thick over the Kansas River valley. An ice lobe covering what is now the Kansas City area was Figure 2. Maximum extent of pre-Illinoian and ice sheets (after “Glacial probably hundreds of feet thick (fig. 2). stratigraphy and paleomagnetism of late deposits of the north-central United States,” by Glacial ice transports all sizes of M. Roy, P. U. Clark, R. W. Barendregt, J. R. Glasmann, and R. J. Enkin, 2004, Geological Society sediment and rocks, often for hundreds of America Bulletin, v. 116, no. 1–2, https://doi.org/10.1130/B25325.1). of miles. Deposits of debris, ranging in size from boulders to clay particles, Kansas. Wisconsinan ice reached as Many geologists believe we haven’t left are collectively called glacial drift. Drift far south as Nebraska and , and the last ice age and simply consider the deposits are found in Washington, glacial deposits from this period provide as a short warm period before Marshall, Nemaha, Brown, Doniphan, important clues to the Pleistocene the next glacial onset. Riley, Pottawatomie, Jackson, Atchison, ecology and climate. Jefferson, Leavenworth, Wyandotte, The Wisconsinan Stage at the end Kansas Glacial Features Johnson, Douglas, Shawnee, and of the Pleistocene Epoch was followed The initial Kansas ice front was Wabaunsee counties. by the Holocene Epoch (11,700 years probably only tens of feet thick and Most glacial landforms, such as ago to the present). Although the slid irregularly forward under pressure (mounds or ridges of drift Holocene has been a warm period from thicker ice to the north. Buried deposited by direct action of glacier without active glaciation, fluctuations wood in Atchison and Doniphan ice), are largely absent in Kansas due in the climate still have occurred. A counties indicates that the ice likely to long periods of erosion since pre- time of significant climatic variability overrode a forest there. If a time- Illinoian time. Some glacial features and from about 900 to 1300 ad known as lapse picture could have recorded the deposits, however, are still visible on the the (MWP) Pleistocene Epoch, it would have shown surface. Directional grooves carved into was first identified in northern a lurching, amoeba-like ice movement limestone bedrock have been mapped in and later also documented elsewhere, along with ecological waves of , Nemaha, Brown, Doniphan, Atchison, including parts of the western United forests, and progressing Jefferson, Leavenworth, Wyandotte, States. A shift to droughts of shorter across the Great Plains as glaciers Johnson, and Shawnee counties. A thick duration around 1500 coincided with advanced and retreated. blanket of mixed soil and rocks, called the onset of cooler climatic conditions Advancing ice reshaped the land, , covers large portions of northeastern during a period known as the Little Ice forcing new stream channels and burying Kansas. “Till” is Scottish for a drift Age, which contributed to widespread others. Before glaciation, the ancestral deposit that formed underneath glacial social unrest in Europe. In France, crop Missouri River was a lesser tributary to ice and was not reworked by meltwater failure due to climatic changes helped a larger ancestral Kansas River. Then (water from melting or ice that spark the French Revolution that led advancing ice pushed the drainage from flows out in streams and carries rocks to the beheading of Marie Antoinette. a now-buried river valley that flowed and sediment away from a glacier).

2 Figure 3. Sea of Sioux Quartzite erratics on ridge crest 5 miles (8 km) south of Wamego.

Glacial ice carried and dropped Monument in southern Minnesota, was previously weathered rocks from carried almost 345 miles (552 km) into hundreds of miles away into Kansas. Kansas. Collectively called erratics, these Because glacial retreat exposed lake rock fragments range from the size beds and meltwater left river valleys of pebbles to house-sized blocks. The covered with silt-sized sediment, large most common is Sioux Quartzite, tracts of land were susceptible to wind a pink metamorphosed sandstone erosion. Strong prevailing winds picked more than a billion years old. Sioux up lightweight debris and whipped up Indiana Quartzite boulders in Kansas came from immense sand and sediment storms southern Minnesota, South Dakota, that far exceeded the storms of the Dust and northwestern Iowa. Sometimes Bowl era. These storms blanketed the these rocks occur in such density Midwest with sand dunes and thick that geologists describe the resulting layers of fine-grained silt called , block field or masses of rock rubble on which is still found at or near the surface summits as a felsenmeer, German for throughout much of Kansas (fig. 5). Figure 4. Sources of identifiable glacial erratics “sea of rocks” (fig. 3). Before disappearing from northeast found in northeastern Kansas. Fragments of More exotic erratics, such as granitic Kansas, pre-Illinoian ice thinned, Sioux Quartzite are common throughout the rocks, agate, Duluth-area leaving hilltops exposed like islands terminal zone and eastward into Missouri. iron ore, Keweenawan volcanics, and in a sea of ice. In valleys, stagnant and Specimens of ore from the Iron Ranges are native copper, are occasionally found in isolated ice persisted for centuries before scarce. Distribution of Lake Superior agates Kansas. Isolated occurrences of catlinite, finally melting away. Later Illinoian from the Keweenawan volcanics is highly which sometimes occurs with Sioux and Wisconsinan ice sheets that spread localized, seemingly restricted to an area in Quartzite, are present in the Tower southward across the upper Midwest and near Topeka. Credit: Wakefield Dort, Jr. Hill area north of McFarland. Also did not reach Kansas. called pipestone because early Native found farther north), temperate climate Americans valued it for carving tobacco Pleistocene Environments deciduous hardwood forests like those pipes, catlinite is purplish-red, ultra-fine Climate changes associated with in eastern Kansas today, and grasslands grained, and soft. Erratic assemblages the Pleistocene glacial cycles altered found in temperate to semi-arid climates help geologists better understand the the Great Plains landscape. Ecological similar to those in central and western origin and direction of glacial movement succession in Kansas included tundra Kansas today. (fig. 4). In particular, catlinite, found ( found in alpine and arctic At the onset of the Pleistocene, in a small area at Pipestone National areas), (spruce, fir, and pine now Kansas was much like it is today. As

3 ice advanced, Kansas’s plant and animal communities moved along with the glacial front. Northern plants adapted and migrated south, and conifer forests, typically only found hundreds of miles to the north, spread into Kansas. By the height of the last glaciation, spruce, balsam poplar, and aspen had advanced to the Midwest. During glacial retreats when the climate warmed, animal species not adapted to the cold, such as armadillos, , and giant tortoises, migrated north. Excavations of the remains of seven at Lovewell Reservoir in Jewell County give a glimpse of life in Kansas near the last glacial maximum, when ice sheets were at their greatest extent, about 20,000 years ago. An ancestral river here probably supported lush during a relatively dry period and attracted a diversity of animals. Archaeological research documents mammoths, bison, camels, dire , horses, llamas, and sloths, as well as many smaller mammal, reptile, and bird species still found in Kansas. Spiral fractures in bones and bone piles that appear to be stacked Figure 5. Because of its grain angularity and cementation, loess remains standing vertically for suggest that some of these mammoths may years in excavations and roadcuts. have either been killed or scavenged by humans around 20,000 years ago, though human occupation in Kansas before 13,000 Additional Resources years ago has not been verified. Other Kansas Pleistocene mammals, Kansas Geology— Guidebook of the 18th Biennial Meeting An Introduction of the American Quaternary Association now extinct, include giant beavers, stag- to Landscapes, R. Mandel (ed.), Kansas Geological Survey, moose, fronted musk oxen, peccaries, Rocks, Minerals, Technical Series 21, 2006, 146 p. rhinos, and saber-toothed and dirk-toothed and Fossils cats. In addition to mammoths, mastodons R. Buchanan, ed., Hydrogeology and Geochemistry of University Press of Glacial Deposits in Northeastern Kansas lived in Pleistocene forests of Kansas, Kansas, Lawrence, J. E. Denne, R. E. Miller, L. R. Hathaway, eating leaves and bark in spruce swamps 2nd edition, 2010, H. G. O’Connor, and W. C. Johnson, or pine parks. Mammoths, in contrast, 240 p. Kansas Geological Survey, Bulletin 229, were larger and specialized in eating grass 1998, 127 p. Kansas Geological Survey and Missouri and preferred comparatively open ground, Geological Survey and Water Resources: Quaternary Stratigraphy and especially tundra. Pleistocene Stratigraphy of Missouri Stratigraphic Nomenclature Revisions River Valley along the Kansas-Missouri in Kansas Acknowledgments Border Current Research in Earth Sciences Guidebook: 20th Annual Meeting of the A. L. Layzell, R. S. Sawin, E. K. Franseen, Thanks to Rex Buchanan, Robert Sawin, Midwest Friends of the Pleistocene, G. A. Ludvigson, W. L. Watney, and R. R. Rolfe Mandel, Catherine Evans, Marla Kansas Geological Survey, Special West, Kansas Geological Survey, Bulletin Adkins–Heljeson, and Julie Tollefson for Distribution Publication 53, 1971, 32 p. 263, 2017, 8 p. reading and commenting on this circular.

The Kansas Geological Survey (KGS) is a research and service division of Public Information Circular 28 the University of Kansas that investigates and provides information about April 2009 • Revised Nov. 2020 the state’s natural resources. KGS scientists pursue research related to surface and subsurface geology, energy resources, groundwater, and Kansas Geological Survey environmental hazards. They develop innovative tools and techniques, The University of Kansas monitor and groundwater levels, investigate water-quality 1930 Constant Avenue concerns, and map the state’s surface geology. Lawrence, KS 66047-3724 785-864-3965 http://www.kgs.ku.edu The KGS has no regulatory authority and does not take positions on natural resource issues. The main headquarters of the KGS is in the West District of the University of Kansas in Lawrence, and the Kansas Geologic Sample Repository of the KGS is in Wichita. 4