Untangling the Quaternary Period—A Legacy of Stephen C. Porter
Stephen C. Porter was an international leader in Quaternary science for several decades, having worked on most of the world’s continents and having led international organizations and a prominent interdisciplinary journal. His work influenced many individuals, and he played an essential role in linking Chinese Quaternary science with the broader international scientific community. This volume brings together nineteen papers of interdisciplinary Quaternary science honoring Porter. Special Paper 548 features papers from six continents, on wide-ranging topics including glaciation, paleoecology, landscape evolution, megafloods, and loess. The topical and geographical range of the papers, as well as their interdisciplinary nature, honor Porter’s distinct approach to Quaternary science and leadership that influences the field to this day.
Further evidence for the Matanuska megaflood hypothesis, Alaska
-
Published:April 07, 2021
-
CiteCitation
R. Michael Wiedmer, Alan R. Gillespie, David R. Montgomery, Harvey M. Greenberg, 2021. "Further evidence for the Matanuska megaflood hypothesis, Alaska", Untangling the Quaternary Period—A Legacy of Stephen C. Porter, Richard B. Waitt, Glenn D. Thackray, Alan R. Gillespie
Download citation file:
- Share
ABSTRACT
The Matanuska lowland north of Anchorage, Alaska, was episodically glaciated during the Pleistocene by the merged westward flow of the Matanuska and Knik glaciers. During the late Wisconsin glaciation, glacial Lake Atna filled the Copper River Basin, impounded by an ice dam blocking the Matanuska drainage divide at Tahneta Pass and the adjacent Squaw Creek headwaters and ice dams at other basin outlets, including the Susitna and Copper rivers. On the Matanuska lowland floor upvalley from the coalesced glacier’s late-Wisconsin terminus, a series of regularly spaced, symmetrical ridges with 0.9-km wavelengths and heights to 36 m are oriented normal to oblique to the valley and covered by smaller subparallel ridges with wavelengths typically ~80 m and amplitudes to 3 m. These and nearby drumlins, eskers, and moraines were previously interpreted to be glacial in origin. Borrow-pit exposures in the large ridges, however, show sorting and stratification, locally with foreset bedding. A decade ago we reinterpreted such observations as evidence of outburst flooding during glacial retreat, driven by water flushing from Lake Atna through breaches in the Tahneta Pass and Squaw Creek ice dam. In this view, the ridges once labeled Rogen and De Geer moraines were reinterpreted as two scales of fluvial dunes. New observations in the field and from meter-scale light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and interferometric synthetic aperture radar (IfSAR) digital elevation models, together with grain-size analyses and ground-penetrating radar profiles, provide further evidence that portions of the glacial landscape of the Matanuska lowlands were modified by megaflooding after the Last Glacial Maximum, and support the conclusion that the Knik Glacier was the last active glacier in the lowland.
- Alaska
- bedforms
- Cenozoic
- Copper River basin
- dams
- deglaciation
- digital terrain models
- drainage basins
- drumlins
- dunes
- geophysical methods
- geophysical surveys
- glacial features
- glacial geology
- glacial lakes
- glaciation
- grain size
- ground-penetrating radar
- ice dams
- InSAR
- jokulhlaups
- lakes
- laser methods
- last glacial maximum
- lidar methods
- lineation
- Matanuska Glacier
- Matanuska Valley
- moraines
- natural dams
- paleofloods
- Pleistocene
- Quaternary
- radar methods
- SAR
- size distribution
- structural analysis
- surveys
- Susitna River
- United States
- upper Pleistocene
- upper Wisconsinan
- Wisconsinan
- Knik Glacier
- De Geer Moraine
- Lake Atna
- Squaw Creek ice dam
- Tahneta Pass ice dam
- Rogen Moraine