How Did Water Shaped Michigan

How Water Shaped Michigan

Minnesota may be the land of 10,000 lakes, but did you know that if you just simply Google: “how many lakes are there in Michigan?” Your answer will be more than 11,000 lakes. Michigan used to be known as the wolverine state, because we had wolverines. Now, since there are no more wolverines, Michigan is simply known as the Great Lakes State. Michigan has a lot of fresh water; it is in our lakes, rivers, and any other wet piece of land that is here. This paper looks at the fresh waters of the Great Lakes State: glaciers, rivers, and people. All of these factors contributed to the shape of this state in one way or another. This paper will show how these factors shaped Michigan into the state it is today.

What is a glacier?

It started at the North Pole and it stretched to the 37th parallel which is along the southern edges of Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri. The estimated area it covered was around five million square miles, and at parts it could reach up to ten thousand feet thick (Britannica). Even though the lakes in Michigan are proof that the Laurentide Ice Sheet melted, it did so very slowly, and there is even some proof that our ancestors lived in the area underneath where the great lakes are today (draining the great lakes). As it retreated, it carved, and under all of that weight compacted the crust enough to create at least five basins that are now the Great lakes. This created an area in where twenty percent of the world’s fresh surface water resides (TED ED). Also during its retreat, the Laurentide Ice Sheet also left behind a desolate landscape that only contained the spores of lichen. Eventually, that lichen sprouted and attracted birds which in turn eventually brought all life back to this once ice covered land mass (PBS). Today some of the rocky outcroppings that the

Beaches are sand, and sand comes from quartz, which is one of the hardest and most plentiful minerals on the planet. This sand was made when the ice sheet would expand and retreat picking up chunks of rocks, and mineral crushing them together effectively making a grinder in the glaciers innards (DNR). Sometimes these rocks and minerals are carried hundreds of miles before being deposited onto the ground. Michigan has a unique coastal landscape dotted with beaches and pine forest, but one thing that Michigan has; that not many places around the world have is bluffs. According to the National Geographic, a bluff is a small, rounded cliff that usually overlooks a body of water, or where a body of water once stood. The reason Michigan has bluffs is because when Glaciers move they do not pick up their ‘feet’. Instead, they bulldoze the landscape picking up everything in their path. Including rocks, organic matter, and even possibly a sloth with a broken leg, the list is inexhaustible. When the glacier stops its advance these objects have been moved hundreds of miles over thousands of years. All of the grinding of giant rocks now leaves sand clay and gravel. This debris is deposited in what today looks like giant mounds of sand in comparison to the mighty size of a glacier. These mounds are moraines and they are what is left when a glacier melts. They have