Chapter 2

(The Saint Johns that’s on the map in no way resembles the Saint Johns of my imagination. The residence is a combination of homes spread through the eastern part of the United States. Don’t go looking for it in Saint Johns. It’s NOT there ... never has been there ... it ain’t real Jim. Besides, I now have the perfect excuse to fuck up ... can’t you hear the sarcasm dripping from my lips?)

It may seem strange but Edmond and Persephone didn’t change their lifestyle. They lived in a house with a four foot high rough stone wall that encompassed an entire city block. The house was on the only hill ... thirty feet tall ... for twenty miles in any direction.

Ionia had a deep gorge and a few steep hills, Grand Ledge had a marvelous waterfall, but everything that had decent hills was a good 35 miles away. Saint Johns was not only flat, it was uphill any direction you could drive ... almost like a meteor strike filled in by glacial till.

Clinton County Court House is built on the convergence of a Wisconsinan Glacial Moraine and several Eskers. The entire area is unconsolidated glacial rubble. Some of the rubble is pretty damn big though.

Just in case, dear reader, you don’t know what or how a glacial ice cap is or works I’ll tell you.

Once upon a time ... for some reason, the world got cooler than normal. It might have been a solar burp, a monster volcano or who knows? What is known is that it snowed ... lots ... in the northern hemisphere and in the southern hemisphere. In the spring and over the summer, the temperature wandered between ‘brass balls’ and ‘witches tits’ and the snow ... most of it didn’t melt.

Autumn drifted into the picture and it started snowing a couple of weeks sooner than normal. It snowed more than normal in the higher elevations ... it snowed a few miles farther south than the natives were used to seeing. Farther south, on what is now referred to as the North American Continent, it rained ... cats and dogs ain’t in it. This happened year after year.

From now on, we’re referring mostly to North America, although the same weather pattern was happening in South America and Eurasia, too. Lots of snow sooner in the fall and later in the spring.

Throughout the next few hundred years it snowed more in the north and rained in the south and got hot as fuck oh dear on the equator.

The equator is a band of low pressure. Heated air rises. (one could also say hot air sucks.) In NORMAL times ... thirty degrees north of the equator (the Horse Latitudes) ... and south ... there is a band of high pressure. High pressure air rushes to replace the rising air at the equator.

The arctic circle is a cap of low pressure ... air from the Horse Latitudes rushes to replace the low pressure in the north. IN NORMAL TIMES!

During severe glacial conditions, the northern Horse latitudes move much farther south. The southern Horse latitudes move much farther north. The Gulf Stream re- routes farther south ... all this cools the continents and the cycle continues. Cold breeds on cold and there is more ice.

Heavily laden with moisture from the hot zones, clouds rush north/south ... the water condenses, precipitates to ice at high altitudes. Falling, it accelerates to high speed and shatters and then changes to snow. The snow falls on top of the snow of last season ... which fell on the year before snow ... which fell on top of the one before that snow ... and the one before that ... and the one before that...

Evaporation DRAWS water ... condensation dispenses it. The more evaporation without replenishment, the less water there is in the oceans. Where did the water go? Snow.

Snow has weight ... shovel it sometime. Stacked snow compresses ... compression causes heat ... The compression, through the application of weight on previously fallen snow creates ice ... if it keeps snowing without seasonal melt the ice gets thicker and heavier ... and heavier ... and heavier. The weight gets so heavy that the crust of the earth crushes. (Hudson Bay and the Baltic Sea are witness to this.)

The snow didn’t melt ... water didn’t run off ... runoff replenishes the ocean ... no runoff? ... a little more land is exposed as the evaporating oceans shrink. Water is a great heat sink. Land ... especially shoreline ... doesn’t retain heat ... ask the returning soldiers how cold the sand gets at night.

There’s more land mass ... runoff didn’t re-cover the sand of the exposed beach. The water got hotter ... evaporated easier ... more sandy beach was exposed. More water was exported to the north and it snowed longer. Heavier snow created more ice and more ice has more weight and more weight crushes more crust.

At it’s height ... the Glacial Ice Cap over what is now Hudson Bay was FIFTEEN THOUSAND FEET THICK ... three miles ... THREE MILES!!

As the ice grew deeper the excess weight caused it to spread ... creeping along gathering up dirt ... and rocks ... and boulders. Scraping creates heat so the underside of that enormous mass of ice was sorta, kinda, mostly floating on the water created by the weight of the ice pushing the ice along the ground picking up dirt, rocks and boulders and creating heat as it moved.

Well, if all that water was trapped in ice ... what happened to the oceans? you ask.

Once upon a time, all the continents had square corners at the edges ... that happened because they were ripped from the single super continent Pangea. (We weren’t there to see it.) Wave action wore away the sharp corners ... the worn away parts dropped off to the deep and the waves had farther to go to get to the sharps ... the sharps became flats ... the continental shelf ... that part of the land that meets the sea and causes most of the great surfing and the bad wrecks.

Aw! ... You’re kidding ... water doesn’t do that ... does it?

Sure it does ... look at the coast of Maine ... parts of coastal Maine fall into the sea every year.

Well ... when the water evaporated the oceans kept shrinking ... getting smaller ... but receding to the limits imposed by the continental shelf. Had the glaciers kept building there would have been a series of new shoreline steps caused by wave action on the edge of the continental shelf ... and in places ... where the basic rock was hard enough to resist the original continent shaping there are deep shorelines.

Well ... just how much water are we talking about here?

A minimum lowering of sea level by 150 feet is postulated ... although, there are those who say 600 feet is a better figure. I’m a 600 guy. A lot depends on whether you believe that it took a geologic minute ... thousands of years for the glacial melt ... or it took a geologic micro-second ... perhaps as little as 20 years but not more than 500. Thousands of years of trickle melt doesn’t create the geological forms present today ... but undeterred rapidly flowing water does.

Eventually ... and don’t ask me why... ‘cause I don’t know ... and I’ve never heard a reasonable reason why ... the land warmed ... solar flare? A good wood stove? The ice stopped spreading because the snow started melting in the summer. Add in a few warm winters ... Global Warming?

As the snow melted so did the ice ... as the ice was diminished the glaciers started receding ... pulling away from the land that they once covered. The rocks, dirt and boulders that were scraped up mostly were channeled into long lines of detritus ... captured in the ice ... or they were clumped in with masses of other detritus but concentrated in a single area along the face of the glacial ice.

The ice is melting ... water is rushing down the ice and cutting immense grooves and pockets as it works its way out of the ice ... RUNOFF ... hey, the oceans start to fill up again.

While there is an enormous amount of surficial water ... water on the surface of the ice ... there is as much, if not more, water following the paths of least resistance UNDER the ice ... water pushed along by the additional water building up behind. Sometimes the ice said NO ... water built up behind such glacial dams until the ice dam broke ... then TRILLIONS of gallons of water were released sweeping away everything in its path ... cutting huge gouges in the earth ... like Chesapeake Bay ... and the Missouri and Mississippi River flatlands. Water rushing down and tossing house sized boulders like grains of sand. Water moving so fast that battleship sized boulders FLOATED on the surface because they were moving too fast to sink!!

Where the melt was held up ... piles of boulders fell out ... Moraine. Where the retreating glacier dropped the long lines of boulders ... Esker. Places where a large ‘iceberg’ calved off and was left by a retreating glacier ... are glacial lakes and glacial lakes that have filled with moss, grasses and weeds become peat beds.

This glacial formation didn’t happen just once.

‘Extreme glaciation began 2.4 Billion years ago and that ice cap lasted three quarters of a Billion years. A rather long period free from ice ensued ... perhaps as long as a billion years. The next glacial period may have formed ice as far as the equator in both directions ... one ice cap from the southern hemisphere and the other from the north. It seems to have lasted well over 3 Million years. The period between the suggested first and second may have been ice free ... even to the poles. These suppositions are poorly documented due to other geologic events. Subduction may well have devoured the major evidence.

Sediment records show the fluctuating sequences of glacials and interglacials during the last several million years.

The current ice age, the Pliocene-Quaternary glaciation, started about 2.58 million years ago during the late Pliocene, when the spread of ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere began. Since then, the world has seen cycles of glaciation with ice sheets advancing and retreating on 40,000- and 100,000-year time scales called glacial periods, glacials or glacial advances, and interglacial periods, interglacials or glacial retreats. The earth is currently in an interglacial, and the last glacial period ended about 10,000 years ago. All that remains of the continental ice sheets are the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and smaller glaciers such as on Baffin Island.