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The Maumee River is a river running in the United States Midwest from northeastern Indiana into northwestern Ohio and Lake Erie. It is formed at the confluence of the St. Joseph and St. Marys rivers, where Fort Wayne, Indiana has developed, and meanders northeastwardly for 137 miles (220 km) through an agricultural region of glacial moraines before flowing into the Maumee Bay of Lake Erie. The city of Toledo is located at the mouth of the Maumee. The Maumee was designated an Ohio State Scenic River on July 18, 1974. The Maumee watershed is Ohio's breadbasket; it is two-thirds farmland, mostly corn and soybeans. It is the largest watershed of any of the rivers feeding the Great Lakes, and supplies five percent of Lake Erie's water.
The Wabash River is a 503-mile-long (810 km) river that drains most of the state of Indiana in the United States. It flows from the headwaters in Ohio, near the Indiana border, then southwest across northern Indiana turning south near the Illinois border, where the southern portion forms the Indiana-Illinois border before flowing into the Ohio River.
The Wabash and Erie Canal was a shipping canal that linked the Great Lakes to the Ohio River via an artificial waterway. The canal provided traders with access from the Great Lakes all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Over 460 miles long, it was the longest canal ever built in North America.
The Watersheds of Indiana consist of six distinct Indiana watershed regions that drain into five major bodies of water.
In geomorphology, an outburst flood—a type of megaflood—is a high-magnitude, low-frequency catastrophic flood involving the sudden release of a large quantity of water. During the last deglaciation, numerous glacial lake outburst floods were caused by the collapse of either ice sheets or glaciers that formed the dams of proglacial lakes. Examples of older outburst floods are known from the geological past of the Earth and inferred from geomorphological evidence on Mars. Landslides, lahars, and volcanic dams can also block rivers and create lakes, which trigger such floods when the rock or earthen barrier collapses or is eroded. Lakes also form behind glacial moraines or ice dams, which can collapse and create outburst floods.
The Channeled Scablands are a relatively barren and soil-free region of interconnected relict and dry flood channels, coulees and cataracts eroded into Palouse loess and the typically flat-lying basalt flows that remain after cataclysmic floods within the southeastern part of Washington state. The Channeled Scablands were scoured by more than 40 cataclysmic floods during the Last Glacial Maximum and innumerable older cataclysmic floods over the last two million years. These floods were periodically unleashed whenever a large glacial lake broke through its ice dam and swept across eastern Washington and down the Columbia River Plateau during the Pleistocene epoch. The last of the cataclysmic floods occurred between 18,200 and 14,000 years ago.
The Oak Ridges Moraine is a geological landform that runs east-west across south central Ontario, Canada. It developed about 12,000 years ago, during the Wisconsin glaciation in North America. A complex ridge of sedimentary material, the moraine is known to have partially developed under water. The Niagara Escarpment played a key role in forming the moraine in that it acted as a dam for glacial meltwater trapped between it and two ice lobes.
Early Lake Erie was a prehistoric proglacial lake that existed at the end of the last ice age approximately 13,000 years ago. The early Erie fed waters to Glacial Lake Iroquois.
The Little River is a 22.6-mile-long (36.4 km) stream in Allen and Huntington counties in northeastern Indiana. A tributary of the Wabash River, it is sometimes called the "Little Wabash", which may cause it to be confused with the Little Wabash River of Illinois. The river drains an area of 287.9 square miles (746 km2).
Lake Maumee was a proglacial lake and an ancestor of present-day Lake Erie. It formed about 17,500 calendar years, or 14,000 Radiocarbon Years Before Present (RCYBP) as the Huron-Erie Lobe of the Laurentide Ice Sheet retreated at the end of the Wisconsin glaciation. As water levels continued to rise the lake evolved into Lake Arkona and then Lake Whittlesey.
Cedar Creek Canyon, also called simply Cedar Canyon, is a topographical feature located in Allen County, Indiana, United States. It is a very straight, narrow gorge about 50 to 100 feet deep that contains part of the lower segment of Cedar Creek, the largest tributary of the St. Joseph River. The canyon originated at the end of the last ice age as a tunnel valley, a channel under the Erie Lobe of the Wisconsin Glacier that discharged meltwalter under considerable pressure into the ancestral Eel River, a tributary of the Wabash River. Cutting through the north limb of the Wabash Moraine, a debris deposit left by the retreating ice, the discharge left a large outwash fan that blocked the Eel, diverting its upper portion into the canyon in a classic example of stream piracy that formed today's Cedar Creek. This was part of a general drainage reversal that occurred in northeastern Indiana as the Maumee River opened and captured drainage that was previously part of the watershed of the Wabash. While the lower Eel remained a tributary of the Wabash, 175,000 acres (710 km2) that it formerly drained became part of the Maumee watershed.
The geography of Indiana comprises the physical features of the land and relative location of U.S. State of Indiana. Indiana is in the north-central United States and borders on Lake Michigan. Surrounding states are Michigan to the north and northeast, Illinois to the west, Kentucky to the south, and Ohio to the east. The entire southern boundary is the Ohio River.
The Kankakee Outwash Plain is a flat plain interspersed with sand dunes in the Kankakee River valley in northwestern Indiana and northeastern Illinois of the United States. It is just south of the Valparaiso Moraine and was formed during the Wisconsin Glaciation. As the glacier stopped at the Valparaiso Moraine, its meltwater was carried away to the outwash plain. On the south side of the moraine, where the elevation drops, the meltwaters eroded away valleys, carrying sand and mud with them. As the muddy meltwater reached the valley where the slope lessened, the water slowed, depositing the sand on the outwash plain. This created a smooth, flat, and sandy plain. Before its draining, the Kankakee Marsh, located on the outwash plain, was one of the largest freshwater marshes in the United States.
The Kankakee Torrent was a catastrophic flood that occurred about 19,000 calibrated years ago in the Midwestern United States. It resulted from a breach of moraines forming a large glacial lake fed by the melting of the Late Wisconsin Laurentide Ice Sheet. The point of origin of the flood was Lake Chicago. The landscape south of Chicago still shows the effects of the torrent, particularly at Kankakee River State Park and on the Illinois River at Starved Rock State Park.
The Mississinawa Moraine begins in Ohio east of Lima in Hardin County, then running in a shallow arc to the south of Grand Lake St. Marys and St. Marys in Mercer County towards Fort Recovery, Ohio. Just west of Fort Recovery, the moraine again arches southward towards the Mississinewa River. The moraine follows the eastern bank of the river northwestward to where it enters the Wabash River at Wabash, Indiana. Angling towards the north and a little east, the Mississinawa moraine merges with the Packerton Moraine north of the Eel River in Whitley County near Columbia City. The moraine does not end here, but continues in a northeasterly direction through the three corners area of Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio until reaching Ann Arbor, Michigan where numerous moraines intermingle. Note: There are two common spellings of the name. Mississinawa is commonly used in the older reports. Mississinewa is the modern usage and the spelling used on modern maps and projects associated with the river. Both spellings are used interchangeably in this article, based on the source material.
The Union Moraine begins in Ohio, east of Bellefontaine and the highest point in that state, towards Greenville in Darke County. Traveling southwestward and arcing a little northward, the moraine reaches Union City, Ohio for which it is named. From here, it travels almost directly westward to Muncie, Indiana. From Muncie, the moraine runs northwest ending in the bluffs overlooking Pipe Creek at Bunker Hill, Indiana, just south of Peru on the Wabash River.
The Fort Wayne Moraine is considered contemporary to the last stages of the Valparaiso Moraine. Centered on Fort Wayne, Indiana, the northern leg of the moraine is mostly overlaid by the younger Wabash Moraine angling northeastward through Williams County, Ohio. It only becomes identifiable in Lenawee County, Michigan south and northeast of Adrian before ending in the intermingling of moraines around Ann Arbor. The south and eastern leg of the moraine follows the northern bank of the St. Marys River into the State of Ohio. At the north bend of the St. Marys River, the moraine arcs northeastward through Lima, continuing in a northward arc to reach north of U.S. 30 in Hancock County to pass through Upper Sandusky, again bending to the north to end 15 miles (24 km) to 20 miles (32 km) to the northeast.
A pendant bar is a large, streamlined, fluvial bar that is typically composed of gravel which occurs just downstream of a bedrock obstruction within a river channel or floodway that has been scoured by either an outburst flood, megaflood, or jökulhlaup. They are often associated with giant current ripples. Malde introduced this to refer to streamlined mounds of gravel deposited by the Bonneville Flood that lie downstream of bedrock projections on the scoured valley floor of the Snake River. They are most common type of bar found within the Channeled Scablands created by the Missoula floods. The obstruction for the initiation of pendant bars in the Channeled Scablands is typically either a knob of basalt or the relict bend of a pre-flood meandering valley.
Lake Kankakee formed 14,000 years before present (YBP) in the valley of the Kankakee River. It developed from the outwash of the Michigan Lobe, Saginaw Lobe, and the Huron-Erie Lobe of the Wisconsin glaciation. These three ice sheets formed a basin across Northwestern Indiana. It was a time when the glaciers were receding, but had stopped for a thousand years in these locations. The lake drained about 13,000 YBP, until reaching the level of the Momence Ledge. The outcropping of limestone created an artificial base level, holding water throughout the upper basin, creating the Grand Kankakee Marsh.
The Packerton Moraine in north-central Indiana has been considered by most persons who have studied it to be a large interlobate moraine between the Saginaw and the Erie lobes. The northeast-southwest direction of the eskers north of Disko, Wabash County, and the southeast-northwest trend south of there indicated that the part of the Packerton moraine south of Disko was built by the Erie lobe and the part north of Disko by the Saginaw lobe. An esker, Miami County shows a northeast-southwest alignment, providing evidence that Packerton moraine in Miami County was built by the Erie lobe. A small area in the northwestern was deposited by the Saginaw lobe. It is named the Packerton moraine from the village of Packerton in Kosciusko County. Thirteen kames and eskers complexes are mixed with sand and gravel. The till is, sandier, especially in the part deposited by the Saginaw lobe, than in the lobe passed over some source of sand, whereas the Erie lobe did not. Water-laid or wind-blown sands are found throughout the moraine. The bulk of the sand seems to have been water-deposited, but locally the sand appears to have been reworked by the wind. Few of the sand deposits exhibit dunal forms.
References
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Geology of the Little River Valley" (PDF). Little River Wetlands Project. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-04-23. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
- ↑ Fleming, Anthony H.; Farlow, James O.; Argast, Anne; Grammer, G. Michael; Prezbindowski, Dennis (2018-12-10). "The Maumee Megaflood and the geomorphology, environmental geology, and Silurian–Holocene history of the upper Wabash Valley and vicinity, north-central Indiana". Ancient Oceans, Orogenic Uplifts, and Glacial Ice: Geologic Crossroads in America's Heartland. doi:10.1130/2018.0051(12). ISBN 9780813700519.
- ↑ Water Resource Availability in the Maumee River Basin, Indiana, pages 37 & 48 Water Resource Assessment 96-5, Indianapolis: Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Division of Water (1996)
