Geography of The Interior United States - The Superior Upland

The Superior Upland

The Superior Upland is the province of the Laurentian Upland which projects into the United States west and south of Lake Superior. This upland, part of the Canadian Shield along with the Adirondacks, is a greatly deformed structure and is composed primarily of igneous and metamorphic crystalline rocks commonly associated with a rugged landscape. At some prehistoric period, this had a strong relief, but today the upland as a whole is gently rolling with the inter-streams surfaces being plateau-like in their evenness. Here they have altitudes of 1,400 to 2,300 feet (700 m) in their higher areas, such as the Misquah Hills and Huron Mountains. In this province, we find a part of those ancient mountains regions that were initiated by crustal deformation and then reduced by a long continued erosion to a peneplain of modern relief. A peneplain with the occasional moderately high monadnocks left behind during the peneplanation of the rest of the surface. The erosion of the region must have been far advanced in prehistoric times, even practically completed, because the even peneplain surface is overlapped by fossiliferous marine strata from an early geological date, Cambrian. This shows that the depression of the region beneath an ancient sea took place after a long existence as dry land.

The extent of the submergence and the area over which the Palaeozoic strata were deposited are unknown. Because of the renewed elevation without deformation, erosion in later periods has stripped off an undetermined amount of the covering strata. The valleys by which the uplands are here and there trenched to moderate depth appear to be, in part at least, the work of streams that have been superposed upon the peneplain through the now removed cover of stratified rocks.

Glaciation has strongly scoured away the deeply-weathered soils that presumably existed here in preglacial time. It left behind firm and rugged ledges in the low hills and swells of the ground and spread an irregular drift cover over the lower parts, whereby the drainage is generally disordered being deposited in lakes and swamps and elsewhere rushing down rocky rapids.