As a child who grew up in the Basin and Range, I never fully appreciated 8th grade Utah Science class until I was almost 30. Lake Bonneville was a mainstay in our neck of the woods and it still is. Mexico City fascinates the hell outta me. How could such a giant body of water be eliminated so efficiently and thoroughly?!
Mexico City has some major issues with their dried lake bed right now. It turns out that the bottom of a lake isn't the best place to build the largest city in the western hemisphere because the ground is incredibly soft, leading buildings beginning to sink by multiple meters.
Mexico City won’t be refilled unless the city and surrounding is abandoned. A lot of that water is used for agricultural and industrial use so outside of a civilization ending event the city should be fine. That is not to say the other criticisms of the city are mute. It is true the land is sinking but again the most populace city in the west isn’t going to be abandoned because of some engineering difficulties
Imagine if you had waterfront property on the Western Interior Seaway and a couple hundred million years go by and now it’s basically worthless desert.
Lake Winnipeg, Lake Manitoba, Lake Winnipegosis and Dauphin Lake are alll remnants of Lake Aggasiz. The Richardson Building in downtown Winnipeg would have been under water.
It actually would have been under 300 to 600 feet of water, from ground level. There are iceberg scours all around Winnipeg. Look it up. Manitoba iceberg scours.
Oh for sure Winnipeg is very low elevation because of it and the Manitoba escarpment and the Saskatchewan plain are the marks the recession points along with the Pembina hills !
Things like this really inspire the imagination. I love thinking about what it would be like to see these places before they were gone. I also love thinking about how different the continent would be if it actually looked like some of those old maps. The first one is especially cool. Imagine how different our history would be in North America was divided by an ocean. Great video!
Undoubtedly there would be different nation states. Perhaps Laramidia would be colonized by Asian peoples. I wonder, which would have a better economy in our modern world? What would language be like? Wars?
I recall reading that European explorers had heard about inland seas from native tribes. It makes a great deal of sense to think that they were referring to the great lakes or possibly Hudson bay. The large body of water dividing the continent could very well represent the latter. But i find myself wondering if what the Europeans heard as there is was actually there used to be. Native tribes have been here long enough to have undoubtedly seen the ice age lakes you mention. There was apparently a lake Ojibway in norther Ontario extending into Quebec. At its peak it may have joined with lake Agassi. That combined lake would have been a true inland sea, from north of Montreal to north Saskatchewan, a distance of about 1500 miles
The "large body of water dividing the continent" was 70 million years ago. There were no native tribes then. Hell, that was before the meteor wiped out the dinosaurs.
Not to pick bones, but lake Agassi was already a true inland seas. As the video mentions, frequently throughout its existance, it was larger than the Caspian Sea which is also a true inland sea.
It's so interesting to learn of the Aztec origins. They had a full-fledged society capable of bringing water to them and constructing artificial islands in the 1300s? Something must've happened to cause them to move. Are they the Anasazi? The ancient enemy? Completely different way of life compared to the northern natives. I'm Plains Cree. We have tons of stories, but most are forgotten. All of my friends and family are so down and not welcomed by society. I wish they could learn of their history. How fascinating it is!
They haven't move. They still exist and known as Nahuatl. Mexican culture is a mixture of Nahuatl and Iberian culture. Unfortunately for the lake bed, the Spanish people decided to drain the lake rather than continue Aztec engineering.
Most people have never heard of the western interior sea, and usually don’t believe me when I tell them there was basically an ocean in the middle of America between the Appalachians and Rockies, and all the Great Plains and Midwest was under water. I get a “yeah sure” response with an eye roll.
Aquaducts in Aztec architecture! Is there any sort of documentation of where and when they picked up / invented that hydrological tech? Thats fascinating stuff for sure.
I remember finding the 'shore' of ancient Lake Gosiute in northwest Colorado a couple years ago. I found massive jawbreaker looking rocks larger than my Jeep. I looked into it afterward to discover they're Stromatolites from the ancient lake shore, I also learned they're the largest stromatolites ever found on Earth ranging from 2 to 5 meters.
At its maximum extent, Lake Agassiz was as large as today's Black Sea. Depending on how far south the Canadian ice sheet extended, Lake Agassiz drained (1) [at maximum ice coverage] down the Mississippi River, (2) [at 'medium' extent] into Lake Superior and out through the St Lawrence River, then (3) [when the ice cleared suddenly from Hudson's Bay] northwest along the Mackenzie River into the Arctic Ocean. The life of Lake Agassiz and the floods from Lake Missoula are some of the most awe-inspiring parts of North American geology/geography/hydrology.
7:43 Lake Agassi existed at the end of the last ice age it has drained and refilled several times. 9:10 IF POSSIBLE / would you consider creating a separate video on the last time Lake Agassi drained and explore the effects it had on world thanks. The effects of rising sea levels would be very interesting.
It’s a shame the governments of those ages couldn’t have come up with some sort of tax to save all those beautiful lakes. Almost like our landscape and planet are continually changing.
There's an interesting explanation for the prevalence of flood myths! It's because civilizations always formed around rivers that frequently flooded because it created the best environment for farming which is what every civilization needed to be sustainable
It's not based in Noah or some biblical myth. It's because every culture has encountered the forces of rising tides and water as well as the sinking and rising of land. Doggerland and Hy brasil are chief examples in this.
@@Benjamin-wi3wt they experienced it or heard stories from the refugees that suddenly appeared in the area telling tales of an angry sea flooding their old home.
@@Adiscretefirm yes the Celtic people are said to have come from Atlantis,as well as a few African pygmy's which eventually surfaced in the belief in the folk pagan spirit called the brownies.
There are some of those lakes that only vanished a very short time ago in geological terms, and their basins are still mostly intact. Imagine if we could refill those basins in the Rockies with sea water to lower their freezing point, and allow for more lake-effect snowfall in the winters. Over time the parched deserts of the Rocky Mountains could be very green and full of new forests and habitats for threatened species. Over the years it could really improve the hydrological cycle by refilling the aquifers, and reviving the river systems. If done right it could also provide new economic opportunities for the First Nation peoples, as there could be trading ports built for them, and canals built to connect to the ocean so they could have international trade without interference from the federal government.
This may seem like a good idea at first, but I’m pretty sure that this would have such a massive impact that something is almost guaranteed to go catastrophically wrong.
@@michaelkaminski1166 quite possibly. But this is something that could be pretty well simulated with the right computer program. Then at least we’d know a rough idea of what the risks would be, or if they’d be worth the taking.
@@michaellutes1057 salt water seeping into the ground water and aquifers would quite literally kill all the flora and fauna in the entire region. not even to mention that when the water evaporates, youd have a huge extremely salty lake comparable to the dead sea that nothing can live in. if you want to get a concrete example of what happens when you turn a sweet water area into a salt water area, or the other way around, well, look no further than the Dutch. weve been there, done that. for example turning the southern sea into a brackish lake has killed all the marine life in the area and biodiversity still hasnt recovered fully a century later. turning a sweet water area into a salt water area is even worse. it kills off all the plants both underwater and on land, and then all the animals starve, and then you have to go in and artificially plant stuff that can grow on salty ground and introduce completely different species of animals. doing this to an area the size of the rocky mountains would be the largest ecological disaster on the planet.
Restoring the ice age lakes to the western US sounds like a great mega project. Massive desalination plants, pipelines and massive earth damns. Then we can connect them with canals. I like it. It would modulate the temperature throughout the west better, and think of all the freshwater life we could have in it.
CORRECTION: Lake Bonnevile suddenly drained when a mountain near the UT-ID border collapsed 12k years ago (fairly recent geologically speaking). This carved the Snake River Plain and the Columbia River Gorge. The drier climate has lowered the remnant saline lakes in the region, but was not the cause for most of the draining.
Imagining vast and seemingly eternal lakes vanishing and forming anew over the course of tens of thousands of years really helps to give some perspective to the unfathomability of geologic time. Growing up in Michigan, I can't imagine a North America or world that doesn't include the dunes and shores of lakes Michigan and Huron. But 20,000 years ago no such lakes existed and 100,000 from now they will probably be gone, thinking about this process happening for dozens of lakes and bodies of water from coast to coast in just a few million years is mind blowing.
One of the leading experts on Glacial Lake Agassiz (Dr. James Teller) lives about a 5 minute walk away from me. I think he's fully retired now, but 20 years ago when I was an undergraduate, I took his fantastic geolimnology class and learned more than I ever thought possible about lakes (including basically all of the biological, chemical and physical processes that they experience, both within the water column itself, and its interactions with sediment, underlying geological features, groundwater and the atmosphere). Fascinating stuff. He did talk a bit about glacial Lake Agassiz as well...for example, I learned that it drained via at least four different general pathways, depending on the status of the lake and the ice sheets that created it. It had outlets to the Gulf of Mexico via a proto-Mississippi (when the lake was high enough to overcome the continental divide in present-day Minnesota/North Dakota), to the Atlantic Ocean via the proto-Great Lakes and Ottawa and St. Lawrence Rivers, to the Tyrell Sea (proto-Hudson Bay), and to the Arctic Ocean directly (which is the drainage mentioned as a possible contributing cause of the Younger Dryas cooling period).
Paleozoic (541 to 252 million years ago) During the Paleozoic, shallow inland seas spread across the interior of Laurentia (ancient North America), covering North America's Precambrian shield. Even the high areas of northwestern Texas and the Ozark Mountains of Missouri were occasionally underwater.
10,000 years ago Lake Bonneville was just the glaciers melting. Back when Mexico had snow Elephants and Los Angeles was a frozen hellscape for most the year I mean, historically speaking that was last weekend. Think of years in dollar amounts. 10 thousand dollars/years vs 90million dollars/years
I live in Lake Agassiz's footprint. Many small lakes left behind, with the largest being lakes Winnipeg and Manitoba. Great countryside, and many beautiful camping spots throughout Manitoba and Western Ontario.
I live in Manitoba, right where the very bottom of Lake Agassiz would have been. If you find yourself, south-west of Winnipeg in a town named Carman and travel due west on highway 245, you'll climb the bank of the ancient lake. Its a very nice drive.
I've been looking up Tulare Lake. It sounds unbelievable. The stories of cowboys, Spaniards and duck hunters. I understand why they drained it, but to live in a lake bed or flood plain will always be insane to me. People need to be educated on where they live especially by realtors.
05:40 man that is crazy, imagine telling the world's most populated city that their city would be completely destroyed and eventually replaced by a DIFFERENT city with a population of over 20 million (100 times more populated) within 500 years! That's like telling the people from Tokyo that their city will be destroyed and replaced with a city of 3.7 billion!
Cool thing about Lake Agassiz in general, from someone who grew up in the parklands in manitoba - when our family was digging to put a basement into our house, several feet into the earth there is a layer with crustacean fossils etc. All along Duck Mountain/Riding Mountain are kinda some of the former beach heads of lake Agassiz during different maximums and you can definitely tell when you get into the earth, it's cool af!
For anyone interested in a deeper dive into Lake Agassiz (😅 ) I highly recomend the book Lake Agassiz by Bill Redekop. Its a great read. I live within sight of where the former lake existed and have had a life long fasination with it.
Good vid. Man, if civilization arose during the ice age, between all the now-prime land locked away by massive ice sheets, the many more lakes, the lower productivity of the agricultural land, I can't imagine the additional land in Sunda, which was an easily farmable grassland and the Saharan steppe would have added enough economical value for such a civilization to have the global GDP, and maybe even population, even half of our current one.
Lake Bonneville drained when a glacier changed the flow of the Bear River and the Lake overflowed near Red Rock Pass, near Pocatello, Idaho. The flood eroded away a natural dam and emptied into the Snake River. The Change of Climate simply assured its fate as the Great Salt Lake, but isn't why it drained.
6.01 , that is literally 1 of the 2 reason why Mexico City has been sinking to Today ,the other reason is the removing of a Large amount of groundwater which is likely what left of the Lake Tex Coca ,,
They say humanity lost centuries of knowledge with the fire of the library of Alexandria. How many did we lose when the Spanish and the other Europeans came to America (Continent)?
Probably not a whole lot, considering that even the Aztecs and Incas, the most advanced civilizations in the Americas, were technologically behind most Old World societies. They didn't even have the wheel...
@johngalt136 Enough to have "myths" survive as stories such as Ragnarok, an accurate account of a solar micronova. Cavenen stories and underground dwellìng places still exist in legend and reality. Men stealing women, which still happens to this day. Our weather was and is still heavily influenced by the Sun. Ancient people knew this. Sun worship was practiced for this reason. The Sun has control over life and death; a very powerful God or Goddess, depending on the culture. Moany people are aware that the Great Flood happened worldwide and will occur again. Our myopic scientists, limited by their specialities (mainly archeologists) miss facts obvious to geologists. Discoveries thàt don't match the latest narrative are squashed or hidden away. Academia has gotten too big for it's britches! I mourn my wasted time in school learning garbage tha never prepaŕed me for reality. We'd have been better served playing the game 'Risk' or 'Monopoly' for an hour, or plant identification, among other things. . At 66 yrs old, I've always learned better by choice, necessity and appreciation, over what nutcases THINK is good for any age group. Children are ill-suited to sit and listen. Any person who has not created and raised a child past puberty belongs as a Principle or on a schoolboard. Non-parents are idiotsfor the most part, living in fantasy land. Kudos to anyone who has read this far. Thank you. I felt a sudden need to rant at 2:30am. For Sun's sake, give tweens and teens places to work and safely socialize! It's important at that age! Give them constructive group projects in natural surroundings rather than the streets or the internet. Fini.
I grew up in western Minnesota, in the Lake Agassiz lakebed. The Red River (the border between Minnesota and North Dakota) is a remnant of the receding lake...one of few rivers in the northern hemisphere that flows north (into Lake Winnipeg). The area around the Red River is referred to as the Red River Valley, but of course it is not a river valley but the ancient glacial lakebed. Extremely fertile farmland.
I'm pretty sure Lake Bonneville didn't simply Evaporate. I was taught that roughly 10,000 years ago at the Northernmost regions of the Lake, a sort of Natural Dam slowly gave way and the vast lake drained into Snake River, eventually making its way, flooding along the way but eventually pouring into the Ocean. That's what really killed Bonneville.. The rest Evaporated and left GSL, Utah Lake & Lake Sevier? That's what I was always taught atleast..
We had seperate seas due to fluxuating sea levels forcing evolution on many animals. Salty water forces most animals to abandon lakes rivers or streams
It was crazy learning about here in the Willamette valley region of Oregon is the location of a cataclysmic mega flood site. Random but due to the flood +lots of Volcanic sediment overburden is why gold deposits in Oregon can be so deeply covered by crazy amounts of overburden before you even get to a pay layer. (Not everywhere is like this but Oregon has areas that are like that. It's annoying Because I love gold prospecting. That's why I dream that I hopefully get to go explore Tasmania someday! Heck I'd love to live there until I'm a old man just in a cabin in Tasmania's wilderness.)
2.14 , so when the Great Salt Lake was born back in the 1980's or 1990's it was really the return of a small part of the Ancient Lake Bonneville Returning ,,
@@SueFerreira75 you can't explain the massive amounts of meltwater floods in the Missoula valley/cascadia, along the entire great lakes icesheet edge/drumlin fields, or even the river systems like the minnesota etc. Explain that
Was it my gas-guzzling SUV or the two coal fired power plants six miles from my house in Saskatchewan that caused all that ice to melt, Lake Agassiz to form, empty, reform, empty, reform, empty? Just curious.
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As a child who grew up in the Basin and Range, I never fully appreciated 8th grade Utah Science class until I was almost 30. Lake Bonneville was a mainstay in our neck of the woods and it still is.
Mexico City fascinates the hell outta me. How could such a giant body of water be eliminated so efficiently and thoroughly?!
What goes away tends to come back eventually (and is called a flood) wink 😉wink....
Mexico City has some major issues with their dried lake bed right now. It turns out that the bottom of a lake isn't the best place to build the largest city in the western hemisphere because the ground is incredibly soft, leading buildings beginning to sink by multiple meters.
They didn't
Mexico City won’t be refilled unless the city and surrounding is abandoned. A lot of that water is used for agricultural and industrial use so outside of a civilization ending event the city should be fine.
That is not to say the other criticisms of the city are mute. It is true the land is sinking but again the most populace city in the west isn’t going to be abandoned because of some engineering difficulties
Imagine if you had waterfront property on the Western Interior Seaway and a couple hundred million years go by and now it’s basically worthless desert.
Imagine we could walk to England a few thousand years ago, but now we have first class waterfront!
Everything has an end, but a sausage has two...
Far from a worthless desert. It's now the most productive bread basket on the planet. The great plains.
Its not that hard to imagine,look at lake mead.
...bad long term investment?....:P
I don't consider that desert worthless at all
Lake Winnipeg, Lake Manitoba, Lake Winnipegosis and Dauphin Lake are alll remnants of Lake Aggasiz.
The Richardson Building in downtown Winnipeg would have been under water.
It actually would have been under 300 to 600 feet of water, from ground level. There are iceberg scours all around Winnipeg. Look it up. Manitoba iceberg scours.
Oh for sure Winnipeg is very low elevation because of it and the Manitoba escarpment and the Saskatchewan plain are the marks the recession points along with the Pembina hills !
And it’s eastern border would have been the Precambrian shield
I grew up in Fargo and I remember driving around in the country once and seeing what was once obviously the shoreline of the lake, it was pretty cool.
Things like this really inspire the imagination. I love thinking about what it would be like to see these places before they were gone. I also love thinking about how different the continent would be if it actually looked like some of those old maps. The first one is especially cool. Imagine how different our history would be in North America was divided by an ocean. Great video!
Undoubtedly there would be different nation states. Perhaps Laramidia would be colonized by Asian peoples. I wonder, which would have a better economy in our modern world? What would language be like? Wars?
it would be cool one video like this per continent, including giga-lake Chad and the impact it had on life forms
I recall reading that European explorers had heard about inland seas from native tribes. It makes a great deal of sense to think that they were referring to the great lakes or possibly Hudson bay. The large body of water dividing the continent could very well represent the latter. But i find myself wondering if what the Europeans heard as there is was actually there used to be. Native tribes have been here long enough to have undoubtedly seen the ice age lakes you mention.
There was apparently a lake Ojibway in norther Ontario extending into Quebec. At its peak it may have joined with lake Agassi. That combined lake would have been a true inland sea, from north of Montreal to north Saskatchewan, a distance of about 1500 miles
The "large body of water dividing the continent" was 70 million years ago. There were no native tribes then. Hell, that was before the meteor wiped out the dinosaurs.
Not to pick bones, but lake Agassi was already a true inland seas. As the video mentions, frequently throughout its existance, it was larger than the Caspian Sea which is also a true inland sea.
@@scottanderson691 an inland sea is typically endorrheic as well though, was lake agassiz a salt water lake?
It's so interesting to learn of the Aztec origins. They had a full-fledged society capable of bringing water to them and constructing artificial islands in the 1300s? Something must've happened to cause them to move. Are they the Anasazi? The ancient enemy? Completely different way of life compared to the northern natives.
I'm Plains Cree. We have tons of stories, but most are forgotten. All of my friends and family are so down and not welcomed by society. I wish they could learn of their history. How fascinating it is!
They haven't move. They still exist and known as Nahuatl. Mexican culture is a mixture of Nahuatl and Iberian culture. Unfortunately for the lake bed, the Spanish people decided to drain the lake rather than continue Aztec engineering.
Most people have never heard of the western interior sea, and usually don’t believe me when I tell them there was basically an ocean in the middle of America between the Appalachians and Rockies, and all the Great Plains and Midwest was under water. I get a “yeah sure” response with an eye roll.
It's why there's oil in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Wyoming, North Dakota, Montana ....
Don't worry. In the future, the water will return to those areas.
Aquaducts in Aztec architecture!
Is there any sort of documentation of where and when they picked up / invented that hydrological tech? Thats fascinating stuff for sure.
I'm looking it up myself
I remember finding the 'shore' of ancient Lake Gosiute in northwest Colorado a couple years ago. I found massive jawbreaker looking rocks larger than my Jeep. I looked into it afterward to discover they're Stromatolites from the ancient lake shore, I also learned they're the largest stromatolites ever found on Earth ranging from 2 to 5 meters.
At its maximum extent, Lake Agassiz was as large as today's Black Sea. Depending on how far south the Canadian ice sheet extended, Lake Agassiz drained (1) [at maximum ice coverage] down the Mississippi River, (2) [at 'medium' extent] into Lake Superior and out through the St Lawrence River, then (3) [when the ice cleared suddenly from Hudson's Bay] northwest along the Mackenzie River into the Arctic Ocean. The life of Lake Agassiz and the floods from Lake Missoula are some of the most awe-inspiring parts of North American geology/geography/hydrology.
7:43 Lake Agassi existed at the end of the last ice age it has drained and refilled several times.
9:10 IF POSSIBLE / would you consider creating a separate video on the last time Lake Agassi drained and explore the effects it had on world thanks. The effects of rising sea levels would be very interesting.
Yes!!!! The 9ft caught me off guard
Agassiz really was in a lake of its own
It’s a shame the governments of those ages couldn’t have come up with some sort of tax to save all those beautiful lakes.
Almost like our landscape and planet are continually changing.
I will go with what the experts say on this one, boss
Trust the tyranny. Sorry i mean science
I was hoping you would cover the Champlain Sea. Perhaps in a follow-up video?
And people wonder why every ancient culture has a great flood myth.
There's an interesting explanation for the prevalence of flood myths! It's because civilizations always formed around rivers that frequently flooded because it created the best environment for farming which is what every civilization needed to be sustainable
@@calebarsenault382 there is far more to the universal flood than flooding.
It's not based in Noah or some biblical myth. It's because every culture has encountered the forces of rising tides and water as well as the sinking and rising of land. Doggerland and Hy brasil are chief examples in this.
@@Benjamin-wi3wt they experienced it or heard stories from the refugees that suddenly appeared in the area telling tales of an angry sea flooding their old home.
@@Adiscretefirm yes the Celtic people are said to have come from Atlantis,as well as a few African pygmy's which eventually surfaced in the belief in the folk pagan spirit called the brownies.
There are some of those lakes that only vanished a very short time ago in geological terms, and their basins are still mostly intact. Imagine if we could refill those basins in the Rockies with sea water to lower their freezing point, and allow for more lake-effect snowfall in the winters. Over time the parched deserts of the Rocky Mountains could be very green and full of new forests and habitats for threatened species. Over the years it could really improve the hydrological cycle by refilling the aquifers, and reviving the river systems.
If done right it could also provide new economic opportunities for the First Nation peoples, as there could be trading ports built for them, and canals built to connect to the ocean so they could have international trade without interference from the federal government.
that would be beautiful
This may seem like a good idea at first, but I’m pretty sure that this would have such a massive impact that something is almost guaranteed to go catastrophically wrong.
@@michaelkaminski1166 quite possibly. But this is something that could be pretty well simulated with the right computer program. Then at least we’d know a rough idea of what the risks would be, or if they’d be worth the taking.
@@michaellutes1057 salt water seeping into the ground water and aquifers would quite literally kill all the flora and fauna in the entire region. not even to mention that when the water evaporates, youd have a huge extremely salty lake comparable to the dead sea that nothing can live in.
if you want to get a concrete example of what happens when you turn a sweet water area into a salt water area, or the other way around, well, look no further than the Dutch. weve been there, done that.
for example turning the southern sea into a brackish lake has killed all the marine life in the area and biodiversity still hasnt recovered fully a century later.
turning a sweet water area into a salt water area is even worse. it kills off all the plants both underwater and on land, and then all the animals starve, and then you have to go in and artificially plant stuff that can grow on salty ground and introduce completely different species of animals.
doing this to an area the size of the rocky mountains would be the largest ecological disaster on the planet.
You think Native Americans could engage in international trade? They just need a waterway? 😂
I’m gpfrom where Lake Agassiz was once located, it’s a wet sponge.
Great video! You hit the most interesting ancient lakes of North America. I enjoyed this! Thank you.
Restoring the ice age lakes to the western US sounds like a great mega project. Massive desalination plants, pipelines and massive earth damns. Then we can connect them with canals. I like it. It would modulate the temperature throughout the west better, and think of all the freshwater life we could have in it.
Nice to know we could turn most of Canada into something usefull like a lake.
There are some very big remnants of Lake Agassiz today in Manitoba and there is flooding covering large areas most springs.
Could you make a video about what the Americas would have been like geographically if the mountain ranges ran East to West instead of North to South?
CORRECTION: Lake Bonnevile suddenly drained when a mountain near the UT-ID border collapsed 12k years ago (fairly recent geologically speaking). This carved the Snake River Plain and the Columbia River Gorge. The drier climate has lowered the remnant saline lakes in the region, but was not the cause for most of the draining.
Imagining vast and seemingly eternal lakes vanishing and forming anew over the course of tens of thousands of years really helps to give some perspective to the unfathomability of geologic time. Growing up in Michigan, I can't imagine a North America or world that doesn't include the dunes and shores of lakes Michigan and Huron. But 20,000 years ago no such lakes existed and 100,000 from now they will probably be gone, thinking about this process happening for dozens of lakes and bodies of water from coast to coast in just a few million years is mind blowing.
You should do a video of what kind of animals lived in these lakes
One of the leading experts on Glacial Lake Agassiz (Dr. James Teller) lives about a 5 minute walk away from me. I think he's fully retired now, but 20 years ago when I was an undergraduate, I took his fantastic geolimnology class and learned more than I ever thought possible about lakes (including basically all of the biological, chemical and physical processes that they experience, both within the water column itself, and its interactions with sediment, underlying geological features, groundwater and the atmosphere). Fascinating stuff. He did talk a bit about glacial Lake Agassiz as well...for example, I learned that it drained via at least four different general pathways, depending on the status of the lake and the ice sheets that created it. It had outlets to the Gulf of Mexico via a proto-Mississippi (when the lake was high enough to overcome the continental divide in present-day Minnesota/North Dakota), to the Atlantic Ocean via the proto-Great Lakes and Ottawa and St. Lawrence Rivers, to the Tyrell Sea (proto-Hudson Bay), and to the Arctic Ocean directly (which is the drainage mentioned as a possible contributing cause of the Younger Dryas cooling period).
How cool would it be to have a sea slicing the US in half?
I found fossilized seashells in the desert north of El Paso Texas. Curious what lake that was up in the mountain valley?
Paleozoic (541 to 252 million years ago) During the Paleozoic, shallow inland seas spread across the interior of Laurentia (ancient North America), covering North America's Precambrian shield. Even the high areas of northwestern Texas and the Ozark Mountains of Missouri were occasionally underwater.
10,000 years ago Lake Bonneville was just the glaciers melting. Back when Mexico had snow Elephants and Los Angeles was a frozen hellscape for most the year
I mean, historically speaking that was last weekend. Think of years in dollar amounts. 10 thousand dollars/years vs 90million dollars/years
I was wondering if you were going to mention Lake Tulare! I live in Visalia, which is about 20 miles east of it
If you look to your east. You can see the lake reforming in corcoran. Im planning on going fishing there in the summer
Great information in this video!
A lot of ditching and draining in Florida and destroyed all our swamps and shallow lakes over the last 60 yrs. It's disgusting
very interesting video, thanks!
Whatever happened to predictability? The milk man, the paperboy, evening tv
I live in Lake Agassiz's footprint. Many small lakes left behind, with the largest being lakes Winnipeg and Manitoba. Great countryside, and many beautiful camping spots throughout Manitoba and Western Ontario.
I live in Manitoba, right where the very bottom of Lake Agassiz would have been. If you find yourself, south-west of Winnipeg in a town named Carman and travel due west on highway 245, you'll climb the bank of the ancient lake. Its a very nice drive.
Thanks for always including the metric scale
I farm in what was the Western Interior Seaway, which is now part of Saskatchewan. Every now and then I will find fossilized seashells in the fields
I've been looking up Tulare Lake. It sounds unbelievable. The stories of cowboys, Spaniards and duck hunters.
I understand why they drained it, but to live in a lake bed or flood plain will always be insane to me. People need to be educated on where they live especially by realtors.
By realtors? Yah, like that is going to happen.
@@mpetersen6 which is why thousands of homes will always sink. It should be illegal
05:40 man that is crazy, imagine telling the world's most populated city that their city would be completely destroyed and eventually replaced by a DIFFERENT city with a population of over 20 million (100 times more populated) within 500 years!
That's like telling the people from Tokyo that their city will be destroyed and replaced with a city of 3.7 billion!
Look up potholes reservoir if you want to learn more about the scablands of Eastern WA. Its a really cool geographic feature!
Very cool video. I would love to see a video about how ancient bodies of water created oil deposits.
I'd like to see the ancients rivers that flowed from Rockies to misssissippi valley
Cool thing about Lake Agassiz in general, from someone who grew up in the parklands in manitoba - when our family was digging to put a basement into our house, several feet into the earth there is a layer with crustacean fossils etc. All along Duck Mountain/Riding Mountain are kinda some of the former beach heads of lake Agassiz during different maximums and you can definitely tell when you get into the earth, it's cool af!
For anyone interested in a deeper dive into Lake Agassiz (😅 ) I highly recomend the book Lake Agassiz by Bill Redekop. Its a great read. I live within sight of where the former lake existed and have had a life long fasination with it.
nice video :)
Good vid.
Man, if civilization arose during the ice age, between all the now-prime land locked away by massive ice sheets, the many more lakes, the lower productivity of the agricultural land, I can't imagine the additional land in Sunda, which was an easily farmable grassland and the Saharan steppe would have added enough economical value for such a civilization to have the global GDP, and maybe even population, even half of our current one.
Lake Bonneville drained when a glacier changed the flow of the Bear River and the Lake overflowed near Red Rock Pass, near Pocatello, Idaho. The flood eroded away a natural dam and emptied into the Snake River.
The Change of Climate simply assured its fate as the Great Salt Lake, but isn't why it drained.
Lake Bonneville actually was held back until a block was washed away and a huge flood swept west
Nice thank you
6.01 , that is literally 1 of the 2 reason why Mexico City has been sinking to Today ,the other reason is the removing of a Large amount of groundwater which is likely what left of the Lake Tex Coca ,,
Special shout-out to lake Tonawanda
🦬
nice
Thankya kindly
Bonneville is on its way back.
Tulare Lake in the southern Great Valley (California) reformed this year.
Is there history of like slat deposits or anything to add to this?
They say humanity lost centuries of knowledge with the fire of the library of Alexandria. How many did we lose when the Spanish and the other Europeans came to America (Continent)?
And also, how many complete resets have modern humans witnessed?
Probably not a whole lot, considering that even the Aztecs and Incas, the most advanced civilizations in the Americas, were technologically behind most Old World societies. They didn't even have the wheel...
@johngalt136
Enough to have "myths" survive as stories such as Ragnarok, an accurate account of a solar micronova.
Cavenen stories and underground dwellìng places still exist in legend and reality. Men stealing women, which still happens to this day.
Our weather was and is still heavily influenced by the Sun. Ancient people knew this. Sun worship was practiced for this reason.
The Sun has control over life and death; a very powerful God or Goddess, depending on the culture. Moany people are aware that the Great Flood happened worldwide and will occur again.
Our myopic scientists, limited by their specialities (mainly archeologists) miss facts obvious to geologists. Discoveries thàt don't match the latest narrative are squashed or hidden away. Academia has gotten too big for it's britches!
I mourn my wasted time in school learning garbage tha never prepaŕed me for reality. We'd have been better served playing the game 'Risk' or 'Monopoly' for an hour, or plant identification, among other things. . At 66 yrs old, I've always learned better by choice, necessity and appreciation, over what nutcases THINK is good for any age group. Children are ill-suited to sit and listen.
Any person who has not created and raised a child past puberty belongs as a Principle or on a schoolboard. Non-parents are idiotsfor the most part, living in fantasy land.
Kudos to anyone who has read this far. Thank you. I felt a sudden need to rant at 2:30am.
For Sun's sake, give tweens and teens places to work and safely socialize! It's important at that age! Give them constructive group projects in natural surroundings rather than the streets or the internet. Fini.
Yea sad how many died and stupid to build in a lake bed, same with lake Tulare in California
Europeans conquered simple cavemen. No more complicated than that.
I grew up in western Minnesota, in the Lake Agassiz lakebed. The Red River (the border between Minnesota and North Dakota) is a remnant of the receding lake...one of few rivers in the northern hemisphere that flows north (into Lake Winnipeg). The area around the Red River is referred to as the Red River Valley, but of course it is not a river valley but the ancient glacial lakebed. Extremely fertile farmland.
Tulare lake (Tuh-larry)
No mention of Lake Algonquin? That was a significant one too
Really interesting!
They were all post Flood drainage pools that drained last, from around 5000 years ago.
Lake Agassiz was way under-reported!
Do another post about it.
Aliens literally told the Aztecs there's a cool island with a lake down south! I'll leave a marker.
Fascinating!
I'm pretty sure Lake Bonneville didn't simply Evaporate. I was taught that roughly 10,000 years ago at the Northernmost regions of the Lake, a sort of Natural Dam slowly gave way and the vast lake drained into Snake River, eventually making its way, flooding along the way but eventually pouring into the Ocean. That's what really killed Bonneville.. The rest Evaporated and left GSL, Utah Lake & Lake Sevier?
That's what I was always taught atleast..
would have been interesting to see what the aztecs city looked like in its prime
We had seperate seas due to fluxuating sea levels forcing evolution on many animals. Salty water forces most animals to abandon lakes rivers or streams
Super cool
Fantastic vid!
I'm curious to see how the climate would be affected if the lake in the thumbnail existed.
09:00 Trippy water :o
thanks geek, that was great
Just as very ancient maps show
I mean, prior to the ice age, water levels around the world were much higher.
Why don’t you do a video covering all of them that used to be in North America?
It was crazy learning about here in the Willamette valley region of Oregon is the location of a cataclysmic mega flood site. Random but due to the flood +lots of Volcanic sediment overburden is why gold deposits in Oregon can be so deeply covered by crazy amounts of overburden before you even get to a pay layer. (Not everywhere is like this but Oregon has areas that are like that. It's annoying Because I love gold prospecting. That's why I dream that I hopefully get to go explore Tasmania someday! Heck I'd love to live there until I'm a old man just in a cabin in Tasmania's wilderness.)
So if all the ice melts worldwide, water levels will drop just like they have before.
If all the available water was being sucked up by the massive glaciation, then why was there so much water in the form of lakes?
hey geography geek make a video about Hawaii's climate zones.
2.14 , so when the Great Salt Lake was born back in the 1980's or 1990's it was really the return of a small part of the Ancient Lake Bonneville Returning ,,
Sorry guys I was thirsty so I drank it
Pass me the addy. 😡
Joe Rogan would love you
No reference to Lake Iroquois?
I'm more inclined to believe the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis.
Mentioning Lake Agassiz without mentioning the River Warren ??
The great lakes still exist
Lake Missoula and the lake Bonneville are history.
Correction: Laramidia not Lamaridia wtf lol
I caught that!
Younger dryas was caused by multiple comet impacts on the NA ice sheet
Not proven.
@@SueFerreira75 you can't explain the massive amounts of meltwater floods in the Missoula valley/cascadia, along the entire great lakes icesheet edge/drumlin fields, or even the river systems like the minnesota etc. Explain that
If there was once water there,there will be again,after the pole flip.
Eyes open
No fear
Be safe.
Dyslectic?
The presenter said Lam a ridia. It is spelled right there on the map as LARAMIDIA. Like Lair-uh-mid-ee-uh.
What happened to all this SUV's that caused the weather to get Dryer and Warmer.......... 12,000 years ago ?
cool vid
I think it's Tenoch-titlan, not Tenach-titlan
That's not what happened to lake Bonneville.
Was it my gas-guzzling SUV or the two coal fired power plants six miles from my house in Saskatchewan that caused all that ice to melt, Lake Agassiz to form, empty, reform, empty, reform, empty? Just curious.
a world with no quebec, bliss
this only is only a partial list. the entire scab lands and more are left out. lake missoula? most of the US has been under water.
It was covered.