Fig. 3. Block diagram showing the main features of central Massachusetts at the present time.
Fig. 4. Block diagram showing the main features of central Massachusetts during the recession of the Ice Sheet.
Each sandy layer is a spring; each clay band, a winter; and the two together mark the passage of a year. High spring floods are rarely local; floods on the Connecticut are usually matched by floods in the Merrimack watershed to the east and along Housatonic to the west. Floods of the past were much the same, and many of them can be identified readily in the banded clays of the Connecticut Valley. Each one can be traced in contemporaneous deposits which were formed in other parts of the lowland and in neighboring lake basins.
Some of the winter bands, together with the layers below them, are torn and folded, and the tops of the folds have been sheared off. Covering them invariably is the sand layer of the spring break-up. Plain from these features is a winter episode of freezing to the lake bottom, and of ice contorting the clays as it expanded and contracted in response to fluctuations in the surface temperatures. The normal cyclic repetition of sand and clay was resumed when these particularly hard winters came to an end.
At South Hadley Falls the lake clays rest upon a gravel bed, and the bottom layer records the lake’s first year of life in that locality. The overlying bands provide the evidence of a characteristic climatic sequence which can also be recognized in the clays at Chicopee and at other points still farther south in the lowland. But at Chicopee there are many layers which are older than the bottom layer at South Hadley Falls; and at Springfield many layers appear that are older than the basal band at Chicopee. From the sediment deposited in its waters, the story of the lake is not difficult to decipher. It existed at Springfield years before it appeared at South Hadley Falls; in fact, it flooded the meadows near Middletown, Connecticut, for nearly 6,000 years before its waters existed near Northampton.
These beds of clay hold the moisture close to the surface throughout the lowland, making it available to the fields of vegetables and tobacco. Towards the valley margins these crops disappear because the fine sediments end against the rocky shores of the adjacent hills which pass into and beneath sloping terraces of sand and gravel. In the numerous terraces which fringe the hills, the horizontal beds of gravel lie above lakeward-dipping beds of coarse sand; they underlie broad flats furrowed by channel-like depressions which radiate from the valleys at the apex of each flat. On these terraces one can easily picture sand-laden waters coursing through the channels and building deltas outward into the lake.
Deltas were built wherever streams from the highlands entered the valley, and they mark the ancient level of the lake. Strangely, their elevation drops from 315 feet at Montague to 300 feet at Amherst, and is only 268 feet at South Hadley. The changing elevation shows either that the lake surface sloped southward—and indeed this would be unique—or that the shoreline was raised in the north and that the lake drained southward. The latter surmise is plainly the more plausible.
Most deltas on the east side of the valley are pitted by numerous conical depressions. In a depression on a delta plain near Montague, an excavation, made to obtain road fill, disclosed a mass of disordered gravel which must originally have been deposited in the horizontal top-set beds of the delta, but which now lies in the bottom of a depression mingled with the fine sand of the underlying fore-set beds. The top-set beds seem to have been supported for some time and then collapsed as if the underpinnings were removed. The crudely circular or elliptical outlines of the depressions suggest that stray icebergs drifted upon the delta slopes, where they were anchored or buried by the sandy outwash. The buried ice-cakes survived until the lake was drained, and the baselevel of the streams was lowered, for the depressions have no outwash within them. They collapsed soon after the lake vanished, because water soaking through the delta sands melted the ice, much as it thaws the ground for dredging in the Yukon. Even today this gravelly ground, particularly the beach of the ancient lake, is well drained, and it forms the best land for the apple orchards of the valley.