Dwarf rhinoceros
Traces of these animals, and others like them, have been preserved at the Agate Fossil Beds National Monument on the Niobrara River in northwestern Nebraska. Here, the buried beds of bone testify not only to remarkable lives but also to miserable deaths. It seems that the drying trend, which had driven back the rain forest and allowed the lush parklands to spread, occasionally became so severe that it stressed even the savannas, causing rivers to dry up and trees to blacken. Animals gathered alongside the dying rivers and died with them. Later, when floods flashed down out of the mountains, the currents gathered up the bones, massing them into backwaters and oxbows.
As the centuries ticked by, the climate became progressively more arid. Soon, in place of the lush savannas, a tawny, almost-treeless grassland sprawled across the plains. And although many mammalian species survived—including rhinos, horses, camels, rodents, cats, and dogs—all were challenged by their changed and unforgiving environment. An unremitting diet of grass pushed grazing animals to develop high-crowned teeth, which grew in to replace themselves as they were worn away. The absence of hiding places put a premium on speed, forcing both predator and prey to adopt the runner’s long-legged physique. Hunter and hunted also came to rely on their quick wits, as the brain power of both players was augmented.
As it turned out, these hard-won adaptations would offer little protection against the trauma that was about to unfold—the Ice Age.
PERMANENT WINTER
NOBODY KNOWS FOR sure why the cold settled in as it did. Whatever the cause, by between about three million and two million years ago, the Earth had cooled so much that permanent winter had settled over the northern reaches of the continent. The tepid summers no longer melted away the preceding winters’ snows. Beginning at high latitudes and progressing southward, drifts massed into mounds, and mounds into mountains, until the snow compacted into ice under its own tremendous weight. Eventually, after several thousand years, these glaciers began to advance, flowing almost imperceptibly but relentlessly south over the Central Lowlands. In time, the northern third of North America was buried under some 2 miles (3 kilometers) of ice; that’s about the height, from base to peak, of Mount Everest. In its heartland on the Precambrian Shield, the ice reached a maximum depth of about 16,000 feet, or 5,000 meters.
Geologists used to believe that the glaciers advanced and retreated four times over a span of about two million years. These successive incursions were known in North America as the Nebraskan, Kansan, Illinoian, and Wisconsin glaciations, in honor of their southernmost extent. But more recent research suggests that the glaciers probably made many more than four sweeps down the continent, each time grinding away the traces left by previous glaciations. Since much of the record has been wiped clear, a detailed chronology of the Ice Age on the prairies cannot be reconstructed. But we do know that by about 1.2 million years ago, a vast slab of ice had bulldozed its way almost to the present-day confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. At its maximum, the ice sheet probably extended over the Canadian Prairie provinces and south through northeastern Montana, the Dakotas, and northeastern Kansas. From there it cut across the plains of northern Missouri and then eastward, across the continent, to the ice-stricken valley of the St. Lawrence.
After that ice sheet retreated, the glaciers never again penetrated quite so deeply into the plains. The final glaciation, for example, which began some 100,000 to 75,000 years ago, didn’t progress much farther south than central Iowa. But the devastation that the glaciers inflicted was not limited to their actual footprint. Whenever the glaciers melted back, they left behind outwash plains of sand and silt. Ferocious winds that developed over the ice fields picked up this grit and hurled it around the interior of the continent. In a number of places (notably, the Great Sandhills of Saskatchewan and the Sand-hills of western Nebraska) the wind laid down its burden in vast fields of dunes. Elsewhere, the storms whipped up clouds of dust—rock that had been ground into flour by the glaciers—and broadcast it over the land. Today, these silt, or loess, deposits, often several yards thick, form the bluffs along the Iowa side of the Missouri River and provide the matrix for rich, rolling farmlands in Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, and elsewhere.
The ice began its final, halting retreat about eighteen thousand years ago. Over the succeeding millennia, a block of ice larger than present-day Antarctica gradually melted away, and it didn’t go quietly. Torrents gushed from the eroding ice sheets, gouging out meandering coulees and wide, flat-bottomed river valleys as they coursed eastward over the plains. Today, dry coulees writhe incongruously across the northern prairies, from nowhere to nowhere, and glacial spillways seem ludicrously oversized for the quiet streams, like the Milk River, that now occupy their broad channels.
And it wasn’t only moving water that left its mark on the land. In many places, meltwater was prevented from flowing away by ice dams, and the silt-laden water pooled to form shallow, milky lakes, such as Glacial Lake Regina in south-central Saskatchewan and Lake Dakota in east-central South Dakota. The largest of these “proglacial” lakes, Glacial Lake Agassiz, flooded some 135,000 square miles (350,000 square kilometers) at its maximum extent (three times the size of Lake Superior, the largest modern freshwater lake), including extensive tracts in Saskatchewan and Manitoba and the Red River Lowlands in eastern North Dakota and northern Minnesota. When the ice and then the water finally retreated from the land, these lake bottoms stood exposed as broad plains bounded by terraced beaches, all covered with a dressing of mineral-rich silt.
The land that emerged directly from under the ice sheets, by contrast, was a rough-and-tumble mess, strewn with the rubble that the glaciers had dropped as they retreated. Sinuous ridges of gravel and silt, called eskers, marked the courses of streams that had once flowed under or through the ice; strange conical hills, called kames, stood where streams pouring out of the glaciers had deposited gravel and sand. One of the most prominent glacial features on the northern plains was a long, broken ridge of hill country, called the Missouri Coteau, that meandered (and still meanders) across central Saskatchewan and south through the Dakotas. Geologists refer to the Coteau as “dead ice moraine,” because it formed when hunks of ice became buried in gravel and lay there for centuries, ever so gradually rotting away. As each block of ice melted, the gravel that had been lying on top of it sagged to form a depression, or prairie pothole.
Meanwhile, south of the reach of the glaciers, on the foreshore of the Rockies, the landscape had also been undergoing renovations. Sometime before the Ice Age set in, the entire western prairies had inexplicably begun to rise. As a result, the rivers, which previously had been building up the plains with loads of gravel and silt, now began to cut through the very layers they had previously deposited. This erosion was most dramatic along the slopes of the Rockies, where the rivers were powerful enough to wear through 70 million years of sediments. Along the Front Range of the mountains in Colorado, for example, the South Platte and Arkansas rivers have dug 1,600 to 2,000 feet (500 to 600 meters) below the level of the High Plains. Only where erosion-resistant layers of rock have stood against this assault can the remnants of the older landscape be seen. The tops of the buttes and mesas that tower over the eroded landscape were once a part of this continuous high plain.
By the end of the glaciation, the Great Plains of North America had been transformed from the seabed of ancient times into a mosaic of distinctive landforms. To the north extended a rumpled terrain of glacial debris. Beyond the limit of the glaciers, to the south and east, lay a softer landscape of ancient ocean floors, much of it now blanketed in wind-shaped drifts of glacial sand and silt. To the west, the flatlands of the High Plains stepped up steadily toward the front ranks of the Rockies. And everywhere, rivers were cutting down into the land, etching deep valleys, canyons and, where the land was suitably dry and bare, badlands.
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