Sherry Chandler » The pre-glacial streams of my childhood
The pre-glacial streams of my childhood
I’ve spent most of my life in territory marked out by the Licking River on the east and the Kentucky River on the south and west (it curves), both of which flow north and debouch into the Ohio on the north. The Ohio is a huge river, receiving drainage of a large part of the Appalachians in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky before it reaches Cincinnati, where it swells to nearly a mile wide. It was a major thoroughfare for western migration and how to get across it still figures into any planning for a drive north.
It was with considerable interest, then, that I learned recently that both the Licking and the Kentucky Rivers are a million years or so older than the Ohio. As is Eagle Creek, a considerable stream that meanders through Grant and Owen Counties where I grew up and where my family now lives. Eagle Creek forms the northern border of Owen County as the Kentucky River forms its western border, and I spent a good part of my childhood in, on, and around these streams.
Eagle Creek and its bottoms are so important in the settlement and economy of contiguous counties that my friend Georgia Green Stamper says that when her pioneering family found land on the banks of the Eagle, they saw no need to go further or ever move again. (You will find this story and others about the Hudsons of Eagle Creek in Georgia’s book of essays, tentatively titled You Can Go Anywhere and due out soon from Wind Publications.) My own family didn’t live on the creek itself but on Elk Creek, a feeder stream for which the Elk Creek Winery is named. Occasional plans to dam Eagle Creek to provide water for the urban areas of Scott and Fayette Counties have always met huge protests from local farmers.
You can see the current Lower Eagle Creek Watershed below. I found the map and pictures of Eagle Creek here. The gray area at the top of the map is the Ohio River. The Creek curls back around into Owen County actually it arises in Owen County south and east of Owenton, travels east into Grant and then curls back around west and into the watershed area you see here. That is the part I lived nearer the headwaters.
According to Stanley Hedeen in Big Bone Lick. The Cradle of American Paleontology (University Press of Kentucky, 2008), plate tectonics threw the Cincinnati Arch (or the Lexington Peneplain) up out of the Ordovician Sea. At that time, say 4 million years ago, the area was a “rolling flattish surface,” somewhat like the Bluegrass Region that is a part of the Arch that wasn’t scrubbed by glaciers. The Old Kentucky and Old Licking Rivers, which even then flowed north, were formed by it’s drainage. About two million years ago, as the map below shows, these two rivers joined somewhere around Hamilton, Ohio, and continued northward perhaps into the Erie Basin or perhaps into another preglacial river, the Teays. Meanwhile Old Eagle Creek may have flowed into the Kentucky at the current site of Big Bone Lick (in Boone County).
Map from Stanley Hedeen, Big Bone Lick, adapted from James T. Teller, “Preglacial [Teays] and Early Glacial Drainage in the Cincinnati Area, Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana,” Geological Society of American Bulletin 84 [1973]:3679, and Frank R. Ettensohn, “The Pre-Illinoian Lake Clays of the Cincinnati Region,” Ohio Journal of Science 74 [1974]:215.
You can see the extent of the Cincinnati Arch in Kentucky in this map from the Kentucky Geological Survey. That horseshoe (ahem) around the Ordovician defines the Bluegrass Plateau.
And this is the way things stood until the first of the Pleistoscene Ice Age glaciers, the Pre-Illinoian, started pushing south. That devil really tore up jack. It was like a big dam coming down from the north. It filled up the Old Kentucky River and all the other north-flowing streams draining between Cincinnati and the Appalachians and turned them into lakes. And as the lakes overflowed into one another, voilá, the Ohio River. You can see from the map below that the peculiar curve of the Ohio in northern Kentucky is pretty much the same as the curve of the glacier. The glacier also pushed up some pretty big hills out of what once was the plain around Cincinnati.
The Pre-Illinoian covered Big Bone Lick and pushed Eagle Creek southward into approximately its current bed. The Ohio cut its present channel as the glacier retreated.
Map from Stanley Hedeen, Big Bone Lick, adapted from Louis L. Ray, “Geomorphology and Quaternary Geology of the Glaciated Ohio River Valley—A Reconnaissance Study,” U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 826 [1974], plate 1
Through it all, though, Big Bone Lick stayed put. Somewhere in all the glaciation, it formed its own drainage stream, Big Bone Creek, and it was always a site that attracted mammals to its salt spring. Hence its name. It has also attracted Native Americans and colonists who distilled its salt, tourists who sought the healing powers of its waters, amateur paleontologists, including Thomas Jefferson, who carried off its fossils, and most lately, creationists who wanted to build their museum beside it to make some kind of point. Fortunately, that last scheme was thwarted.
No particular reason for telling all this except that it fascinated me and maybe illustrates the magnitude of change we may see as the globe warms. If you want more information, visit Kentucky Geological Survey’s Fossils of Kentucky and other links on the page.
Update: Harry says he’s already getting hay fever over there in England and links to this article in the Telegraph:
Traditional British winters no longer exist and spring should be brought forward because the seasons have changed so much in recent years, according to the curator of Kew Gardens.
While long, hard winter freezes which were once commonplace are now gone, trees traditionally seen as harbingers of spring are awakening months early.
Dr Nigel Taylor, curator of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, said the changes were significant this year because they had affected hardy, woody plants, not just bulbs.
English Hawthorn, also known as May for flowering in that month, was already in leaf in late January, two months early. It may now flower before the end of this month.
Both Blackthorn and Common Ash are already in flower. Daffodils, crocuses and snowdrops are also early this year according to the gardens’ latest data.
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