The Quaternary environment
Glaciation
The most distinctive changes seen during the Quaternary were the advances of ice into temperate latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. The glacial landscapes were dominated by ice several kilometres thick that covered all but the highest peaks in the interior. Grounded ice extended onto the continental shelf in the Barents, Kara, and Laptev seas, much of the Canadian coast, and the Gulf of Maine. Ice shelves similar to those seen today in the Ross and Weddell seas of Antarctica are postulated to have existed in the Norwegian Sea and the Gulf of Maine and were likely in many other settings. High ice and domes of cold high-pressure air displaced the polar jet streams, steering storm tracks south to the glacial margins and beyond. In addition, cold sinking air over the ice sheets created strong down-flowing katabatic winds, drying land near the glaciers. Land close to the glaciers and affected by the cold temperatures (periglacial landscapes) were areas of permafrost and tundra. Farther away, vast dry, cold grasslands (steppes) were formed.
The “Ice Ages”
It is common to see the “Ice Age” described in popular magazines as a time in which the “ice caps expanded from the North and South poles to cover much of the Earth.” This is very misleading. In fact, expansion of the Antarctic ice sheets was limited to the Ross and Weddell seas and other shelves, with inland buildup of only a few hundred metres. In the Northern Hemisphere, vast areas that are now ice-free were indeed covered with ice, but the expansion was not from the North Pole. Rather, it spread from the centres of Canada, Scotland, Sweden, and possibly northern Russia. Ice sheets may have pushed out onto continental shelves and may have formed ice shelves, but in general deep-ocean basins such as the Arctic Ocean were not the centres of growth.
Continental ice sheets formed and extended into temperate latitudes numerous times in the Quaternary, but the terrestrial record of these events is somewhat incomplete. The traditional view is that of only four major glacial periods, or “ice ages.” They have been correlated to one another in a rather simple manner and are reflected in the names of some geologic units. However, since the 1950s the marine record has become more useful because of its greater continuity and preservation. Marine cores may contain microscopic fossils of single-celled organisms called foraminifera, whose shells contain a record of water temperature and composition as stable isotopes of oxygen and carbon. These isotopes have revealed that dozens of major glacial-interglacial episodes have taken place during the Quaternary. Even more detailed records have been recovered from cores through glacial ice (see ice core). On land, the terms glacial or glaciation describe cold periods of the greatest duration, whereas the intervening warm periods are called interglacials. Shorter glacial episodes are known as stadials, with the corresponding warm intervals being interstadials. As is shown in the table, these episodes are given specific names in the regions where they occurred. The marine record, on the other hand, uses numbers to designate periods of warming and cooling. Cool stages have even numbers, warm have odd, and the numbers go up as one proceeds from the most recent event to the most distant. The marine stages roughly correspond in length to the stadials and interstadials. Thus, marine isotope Stage 2 was the peak glacial period 11,500–20,000 years ago, while Stage 5 was the peak warm period 70,000–130,000 years ago.
| North America | northern Europe | Alps | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| thousand years ago* | glaciation | interglaciation | glaciation | interglaciation | glaciation | interglaciation |
| *Absolute ages of events before the Illinoian, Saale, and Riss glaciations are somewhat speculative. | ||||||
| Source: D.Q. Bowen, Quaternary Geology (1978, Pergamon Press, Oxford). | ||||||
| 13–60 | Wisconsin | Weichsel | Würm | |||
| 115–140 | Sangamon | Eemian | Riss-Würm | |||
| 140–350 | Illinoian | Saale | Riss | |||
| 440–500 | Yarmouth | Holstein | Mindel-Riss | |||
| 500–640 | Kansan | Elsterian | Mindel | |||
| 640–700 | Aftonian | Cromerian | Günz-Mindel | |||
| 780–900 | Nebraskan | Menapian | Günz | |||
| 900–1,300 | Waal | Donau-Günz | ||||
| 1,300–1,500 | Eburon | Donau | ||||
There are four named major glaciations in North America. The earliest, the Nebraskan, is found on the plains of the central United States. The Kansan overlies it and extends slightly farther southwest into Kansas. The Illinoian, as the name implies, terminates primarily in Illinois. The Wisconsin Glacial Stage was extensive in Wisconsin as well as in New York, New England, and the Canadian Maritime Provinces. This last advance removed most evidence of earlier glaciations in these regions. The actual positions of the southern edges of these ice sheets varied considerably from glacial to glacial. The northern extent of the ice is poorly known at best. Similar sequences are found from Scandinavian ice sheets and from ice in the Swiss and Austrian Alps.
Glacial remnants
Landforms
There have certainly been previous periods of geologic time in which glaciers were extensive (during the late Precambrian and the Permian Period, for example), but the Quaternary has left a distinctive imprint on modern landscapes and surface environments. The most distinguishing characteristics of the Quaternary in middle and high latitudes are glacial sediments and evidence of glacial erosion.
Glacial erosion is the predominant feature of high mountains such as the Alps, Himalayas, Andes, and Rockies. Glacial erosion has sculpted deep alpine valleys, and it has left sharp erosional remnants such as the Matterhorn in Europe. Valley glaciers near the ocean sculpted deep fjords in Norway, Greenland, northern Canada, Alaska, Chile, and Antarctica. Submerged on the continental shelf are even larger sculpted troughs formed by ice streams, large fast-moving tongues of ice draining from continental ice sheets. These troughs are ubiquitous on the Antarctic shelf near the largest modern ice sheet. Relict examples are found in the Laurentian Trough, the Hudson Strait, the Barents Sea north of Norway, and many other locations. Other large-scale examples of glacial erosion include the Great Lakes and the Finger Lakes of New York. In innumerable smaller examples, a combination of glacial erosion and deposition so altered the landscape as to derange the drainage completely, resulting in the tens of thousands of lakes of Minnesota, Maine, and Alaska as well as Canada, Scandinavia, and northern Russia. Limited examples exist in the Southern Hemisphere, such as the lake districts of New Zealand and Chile.
Glaciers deposit sediments and other geologic debris called till, especially near their bases, sides, or fronts. Ridges of till and outwash sand left at the terminal or lateral margins of glaciers are known as moraines, and major moraine belts mark former continental ice sheets in the middle portions of North America, Europe, and Scandinavia. Nowhere is the importance of moraines to forming the landscape more evident than Long Island, New York. The entire island is framed by two major terminal moraines (the Harbor Hill and Ronkonkama Moraines) associated with the Laurentide Ice Sheet. First deposited between 22,000 and 18,000 years ago, these glacial sediments were subsequently reworked by coastal and stream processes into the sandy barrier islands off of Long Island’s south shore. Other types of glacial deposits are widespread in the Northern Hemisphere north of roughly 40–50° N latitude, forming many landscapes and shorelines.
Till also forms drumlins, streamlined hills that align with former ice movement. Excellent examples are seen in Boston Harbor, Nova Scotia, Ireland, Scandinavia, and northwestern Canada. In other areas, till is more irregular (see kame) or deposited as a thin blanket over bedrock. Moving water also plays a large part in sediment deposition and subglacial erosion. One of the most striking landforms in formerly glaciated terrain is the esker. Eskers are sinuous ridges 20 or 30 metres (65 or 100 feet) high and hundreds of kilometres in length, with steep side walls. They were deposited in pressurized tunnels at the base of ice sheets during melting phases. They are well displayed in Ontario, Maine, and Sweden. Other ice-contact stratified drift was emplaced adjacent to melting ice walls in valleys (kame terraces), as wet alluvial fans (valley train deposits), and as deltas built into glacial lakes and the sea. Glacial-marine deltas are well exposed in Maine and the Canadian Maritime Provinces, where they provide clear evidence of postglacial sea-level changes—including some terrain that has risen more than 100 metres since the ice retreated, a phenomenon called isostatic rebound.
In drier areas extensive sand dunes and loess sheets were produced. Loess blown from outwash fans and river valleys in front of the glaciers accumulated to more than eight metres in thickness along much of the Mississippi River valley. These deposits become thinner to the east, showing the influence of prevailing westerly winds. Other thick loess deposits are found in Europe and Asia, including extensive sections along the Huang He (Yellow River) west of Beijing.
Lakes
Extensive glacial lakes were formed by a variety of glacial-age dams. They could form simply as pools in the depressions created by the ice sheets, in eroded scours, such as the Great Lakes and the Finger Lakes of New York, by ice dams, or by dams of glacial sediments. Glacial lakes of various sizes ringed the decaying Laurentide Ice Sheet in North America, such as Canada’s former Lake Agassiz, leaving extensive laminated silts and clays. Remnants of glacial lakes are found in the great arc of Canadian lakes such as Great Bear, Great Slave, Athabasca, Winnipeg, and the Great Lakes. Similar deposits and remnant lakes are found in Europe and Asia, with evidence that glacial-age rivers may have flowed extensively to the south into the Aral, Caspian, and Black seas.
Away from the direct influence of glaciers, there were also many large pluvial lakes, water bodies formed by heavier rains brought by shifting jet streams and storm tracks. These regions are now dry, including many valleys in Nevada and Utah that now contain dry salt flats or shrunken remnants. Lake Lahontan and Lake Bonneville were two of the largest of these. The Great Salt Lake is the modern remnant of Lake Bonneville, whose highest shoreline was formed 18,000 years ago, 330 metres (1,000 feet) above the present lake level. Pluvial lakes were formed as far south as Mexico, Africa, and other locations. The timing of their formation, however, does not correlate easily because of the complex patterns of shifting climates. Lakes contain excellent records of climate change in their shorelines, deep-basin sediments, and fossil record. For example, Lake Tulane in Florida has been extensively studied for its fossil pollen, returning a 50,000-year record that seems to correlate with the marine record of Heinrich Events.