Show description

However, the oceans rose faster than the land rebounded, and salt water backed into the St. Lawrence River Valley and eventually crept around the southern and eastern edges of the shrinking glacier, and finally into Vermont. Lake Vermont became diluted with sea water and changed into the Champlain Sea, as we have named it, an estuary of the ocean with about half its salinity. During a later colder period of glacier advanced once more, recreating a second Lake Vermont, then withdrew to allow formation of a second Champlain Sea.

The sun is but a morning star. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854) Page 2 Introduction. As we hike on one of Vermont's wooded trails, or swim in one of its lakes, or simply gaze at its mountains, most of us are impressed with the solidity of what we see. We tend to assume that what is before us has been there forever. And many hope that it will continue in its natural beauty forever hence. But we should stop and consider. No place on earth ever really stands still. The relentless actions of erosion and deposition, the massive movements of continents, the changes of climates and seasons, the interplay of living and nonliving thingsall have shaped this world.

A comparable lake was formed on the eastern side of Vermont and the western side of New Hampshire by the damming of the Connecticut River. This Lake Hitchcock reached as far west as Randolph and north beyond St. ) The sheer weight of the ice had depressed the land 500 to 600 feet, so that Lake Vermont actually drained south into what is now the Hudson Valley. At the same time, the sea level was more than 400 feet lower than it is today, owing to water locked up as glacial ice. But as the ice melted, the land began to spring back and the oceans to rise.