Digital Nature Walk - The Sand Plains of Glacial Lake Hitchcock
During the last Ice Age, New England, like much of the northern hemisphere, was covered by a massive glacier up to a mile thick. When the Ice Age ended and temperatures started to rise again around 18,000 years ago, this glacier began to melt and the resulting flood waters slowly filled the Connecticut Valley, forming a massive, but skinny glacial lake (Meszaros 2019). This lake, named Glacial Lake Hitchcock by the geologists who first discovered evidence of it, stretched at its height from what is today St. Johnsbury in Vermont all the way down to Rocky Hill, Connecticut, where a large sediment dam blocked the water from flowing into Long Island Sound. Much like the glacial lakes that we still see today in the far north, Lake Hitchcock would have been a dynamic place, with large chunks of ice regularly breaking off from the glacier in the warmer months and floating away through cloudy, turquoise waters. Along with its stores of frozen water, the glacier would also have released tons o