Ice Age
During Ice Ages, glacial activity shaped much of New England’s landscape, eroding mountains, leaving glacial till scattered everywhere, and forming glacial lakes. At its greatest extent, one of these glaciers leaves behind a moraine which becomes today's Long Island. One of the biggest glacial lakes of the time was Glacial Lake Hitchcock. It formed when the Laurentide ice sheet retreated and glacial meltwater began to accumulate at the glacier’s terminal moraine in Rocky Hill, Connecticut and back up into the Connecticut River. The glacial lake left behind a soft, varved landscape, gathering silt and sand in the summertime due to the influx of glacial meltwater and clay in the wintertime as the lake froze until it was later drained.
Read more about this topic: Geology Of Connecticut
Famous quotes containing the words ice and/or age:
“Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Cruel children, crying babies,
All grow up as geese and gabies,
Hated, as their age increases,
By their nephews and their nieces.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)