The Iowa Great Lakes are an iconic summer destination today, but its story begins with ice sheets, buried valleys, and layers of sediment that tell us what came before.
To bring that unseen history to life, we turned to a field guide created by the Iowa Geological Survey in 1991. Titled “Guidebook to the Quaternary Geology of the Iowa Great Lakes Region,” the publication is a sort of scientific roadmap, but it feels like love letter to the land. It’s filled with maps, cross-sections, and field photos that trace how glaciers reshaped this region. If you're interested in following the tour by bike or on foot, let us know. We’d love to join you!
episode info
The Iowa Great Lakes are an iconic summer destination today, but its story begins with ice sheets, buried valleys, and layers of sediment that tell us what came before.
To bring that unseen history to life, we turned to a field guide created by the Iowa Geological Survey in 1991. Titled “Guidebook to the Quaternary Geology of the Iowa Great Lakes Region,” the publication is a sort of scientific roadmap, but it feels like love letter to the land. It’s filled with maps, cross-sections, and field photos that trace how glaciers reshaped this region. If you're interested in following the tour by bike or on foot, let us know. We’d love to join you!
episode info
There's also fascinating history of science story in the Iowa Great Lakes, as we talked about in our Lakeside Laboratory episode last season. Before satellites or digital maps, scientists like Thomas McBride documented the Iowa Great Lakes by hand. A professor at the University of Iowa and later founder of the Lakeside Lab, McBride published a report in 1899 filled with early photographs, field notes, and a hand-drawn map of the region. Ten years later, he founded the Lakeside Lab.
His work captures a landscape just beginning to be studied: shorelines untouched by settler development, glacial boulders scattered across open prairie. McBride’s urgency to record these features laid the foundation for over a century of research and helped inspire the creation of a scientific field station on the lake’s edge -- and extends to the research led by the Iowa Geological Survey and Lakeside Lab today.
There are a lot of parts of this story that require some... imagination to wrap your head around. Our story begins long before glaciers shaped the Iowa Great Lakes. This region was covered by a shallow ocean called the Western Interior Seaway. As seas retreated and glaciers advanced, they carved out the lakes we know today.
You can still see that glacial legacy in Iowa’s topography, from the jagged glacial ridges to the prairie potholes at places like Spring Run Wildlife Area (pictured below). These quiet features remind us that deep history isn’t gone. It’s right under our feet.
There are a lot of parts of this story that require some... imagination to wrap your head around. Our story begins long before glaciers shaped the Iowa Great Lakes. This region was covered by a shallow ocean called the Western Interior Seaway. As seas retreated and glaciers advanced, they carved out the lakes we know today.
You can still see that glacial legacy in Iowa’s topography, from the jagged glacial ridges to the prairie potholes at places like Spring Run Wildlife Area (pictured below). These quiet features remind us that deep history isn’t gone. It’s right under our feet.
There's also fascinating history of science story in the Iowa Great Lakes, as we talked about in our Lakeside Laboratory episode last season. Before satellites or digital maps, scientists like Thomas McBride documented the Iowa Great Lakes by hand. A professor at the University of Iowa and later founder of the Lakeside Lab, McBride published a report in 1899 filled with early photographs, field notes, and a hand-drawn map of the region. Ten years later, he founded the Lakeside Lab.
His work captures a landscape just beginning to be studied: shorelines untouched by settler development, glacial boulders scattered across open prairie. McBride’s urgency to record these features laid the foundation for over a century of research and helped inspire the creation of a scientific field station on the lake’s edge -- and extends to the research led by the Iowa Geological Survey and Lakeside Lab today.
