The Hitchcocks. March 27, 2011
Posted by littlebangtheory in Art and Nature.Tags: Hadley, Lake Hitchcock, Mount Hitchcock, Northampton, Pleistocene epoch, South Hadley, varves.
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That would be Mount Hitchcock, straddling the border between Hadley and South Hadley, Massachusetts, and here seen presiding over the flood plains along the Connecticut River:
The foreground puddle is a remnant of melting snow; these fields will be plowed for corn when they’re dry enough.
…and Lake Hitchcock: The plains of Northampton and Hadley are vestiges of the lake-bottom varves, or seasonally deposited sediments, laid down by the Pleistocene-era Lake Hitchcock, which stretched about two hundred miles from northern Vermont to southern Connecticut between 15,000 and 12,000 years ago. The lake eventually found a path around its terminal moraine dam down by present-day Rocky Hill, CT and the lake drained, leaving only the current Connecticut River in its place, here seen passing beneath the Cooley-Dickenson Bridge between Northampton and Hadley:
This is another example of a failed sunset foray producing something else worth looking at, at least for me!
