71st Annual Reunion
Northeastern Friends of the Pleistocene
May 30-31 & June 1, 2008

Glacial Geology of the Northern Hudson-Southern Champlain Lowlands

Presented by
Dave De Simone, John Rayburn, Gary Wall and Andy Kozlowski

Hosted by
The Six Flags Great Escape Lodge & Indoor Waterpark
Queensbury, NY

Greetings from upstate New York!

The 2008 Friends of the Pleistocene Field Trips and Meeting will be hosted by The Great Escape Lodge in Queensbury, NY. We’ve arranged a spectacular room rate, more so when you consider it includes access to the Indoor Waterpark. This host facility makes it attractive to bring the entire family to the FOP meeting as the children and grandchildren can enjoy the Waterpark or go across the road to the Six Flags Lake George Theme Park. All of the attractions of the Lake George resort area are nearby for pre–trip or post–trip fun. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to stay at another facility but we will provide a list of alternative accommodations in the formal announcement for the trip. As usual, box lunches will be included and The Lodge has an optional buffet breakfast you can add to your accommodation. For those who may wish to join us from farther a field and will be flying into Albany International Airport, please let your trip leader know if you need assistance with your travel arrangements.

We plan to link the 2008 trip with last year’s Plattsburgh trip by continuing the discussion of Hudson–Champlain lowlands glacial lake levels, lake outlets and drainage events. Our wanderings may take us as far north as Brandon, VT, and conclude as far south as the Cohoes Falls at the confluence of the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers. We may venture as far east as Dorset, VT, and as far west as Luzerne, NY. We anticipate an optional Friday trip to reach the northernmost exposures. The actual trip stops are undetermined at this writing in December. However, we expect to visit the northern Hudson–southern Champlain area on Saturday. On Sunday, we’ll head south toward the Hudson–Mohawk confluence.

Topics for discussion will include any or all of the following. We’ll examine Lake Quaker Springs and Lake Coveville; these two glacial lakes spanned the Hudson–Champlain divide and, thus, existed in both valleys. The tilted water planes for both these lakes can be traced from the Champlain Valley through the Hudson Valley to their outlet locations. Lake Coveville and its outlet will be a focus of the trip. The impact of this outlet on the evolution of drainage along the IroMohawk River and its distributaries will be an interesting discussion. We hope to re–visit the Fort Ann outlet channels and possibly see the impressive potholes depicted in Chapman’s old photos if these features have not been blasted away or are now on restricted lands. There was no Lake Fort Ann, Upper or Lower, in the Hudson Valley. What we used to refer to as Fort Ann levels in the Hudson Valley are really terraces associated with the GlacioHudson River down cutting in Fort Ann time. The impact of high discharge drainage events on the evolution of the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys and the establishment of the present path of the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers will be discussed. Wider implications will be the subject of much speculation.

Last, and not least, I hope we can discuss how we do and should look at evidence for ice readvance. In the old days, it was prevalent to name a readvance and give it a capitol "R". Today, we need to be mindful that the H–C lobe probably, even likely, surged for various reasons – glaciological changes, climatic changes, ice marginal changes. It may be valuable to re–visit "popular" readvances of old, re–assess their extent, and even question their validity. The Luzerne readvance will be re–examined in this context as it was hypothesized to have impacted the area for our field trips. Recent work does not support the readvance hypothesis. Should alternative interpretations of the many early field workers who examined the type sections for the Luzerne readvance be any less valid than the hypothesized readvance? Shouldn’t there be a representative body of evidence that unambiguously indicates a readvance before the readvance becomes an accepted event? Have interpretations of Hudson Lowland deglaciation been historically hampered by the constraints of proposed readvance events that are ambiguous in their nature and extent and have not been positively correlated to the well documented paleoclimatic record?

Please join us. Contact Dave De Simone for additional details: hawkeye272david@yahoo.com

Site hosted by the University of Maine