Welcome and thank you for being here. It's thanks to the Sheboygan County Historical Museum for hosting us. It's great to be here in Sheboygan. It's one of my favorite towns perched on the Big Lake. It's culturally historically rich town and I just love to visit Sheboygan. Well, we're here tonight to talk about my book, Wisconsin State Parks, Extraordinary Stories of Geology and Natural History, published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. And before we start that, I want to take a minute to further what Chloe said and thank my wife, Gail, who's here with us tonight. I wouldn't be here, likely, if it wasn't for all the help, invaluable help I got from Gail in terms of ideas and research and coaching and managing. And so I want to thank, give special thanks to Gail. And we already applauded the treats, so... Well, who here has a favorite state park? Just shout out a few state parks. Your favorites. Peninsula State Park. Devils Lake. Coroundry. Coroundry down the shore. And Wyloosing over on the Mississippi. What is it about those parks that makes them your favorite park? Just a few two or three-word answers to that question. Why is it your favorite park? It's pretty. It's pretty. They're beautiful, the parks. Quiet. Quiet. Solitude. Peace and quiet. All kinds of reasons why people love the state parks. They receive millions of visitors every year. And this evening we're going to look a little deeper into why the parks are so beautiful. I'll talk a little bit about the book. And then we'll follow that with some time for questions. And then you can grab some treats and I can sign some copies of the book if you wish. Well, when it comes to state parks and other beautiful places that I like to visit, what drives me is the desire to know them better, to understand what made them what they are. Like you, I've enjoyed exploring and learning about the parks. What makes them the way they are. I grew up in the Northwestern part of Wisconsin. I was lucky to have parents who got me into the woods to explore as often as they could get me out. And I remember one time in particular when I was pretty little, we went on a hike in the woods in the south of Ashland, Wisconsin, the far northern part of the state. And we went in on a trail into the woods. Soon started hearing the sound of rushing water and it got louder as we hiked along and we rounded one bend in the trail and there was beautiful little, Morgan Falls County Park. It's a beautiful little secluded waterfall in the far north's deep woods. And I dedicated the book to my parents because it was experiences like this that sparked my desire to know the stories of such places. And Gail and I have carried on the tradition taking our kids to the places we love to explore, like Devils Lake State Park. Those are my kids, Will and Katie. Since the photo was taken, we've all grown up, I guess. But it was these experiences, family experiences, and others that shaped my career as a science writer. One thing that caught my eye a few years ago is this beautiful map published by the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey. It does a fabulous job of showing the variety of landscapes that we have right here in Wisconsin, including the deep woods of the north. The cliffs of Dorr County, just up the shore from us here. The central sand plain with its buttes, and spires, and mounds of sandstone. And the driftless area of the southwest with its deep valleys and river bluffs. That's Gail in the photo there. She's checking out a feature at Wyloosing State Park called the Keyhole. And so it occurred to me that to explore any one of these areas in the state to zoom in and explore, one could use the wonderful state parks and forests of the state as entry points. We can think of the state parks and state forests as time portals or gateways to the ancient past. And that idea really intrigued me. So I decided that by going to the parks, exploring, learning their stories, and telling them in a book, I could share my fascination about the geology and natural history of our state. So let's take a look at the book and talk about how you might use it next time you go to a park. And later we'll take a brief tour of nearby Coler-Andre State Park. But first I want to mention the first chapter in the book. It tells the bigger geologic story of the Wisconsin region. Now if you're already a Wisconsin geology expert or well-versed, you may not need this chapter. But for those of us who are not, it gives a good overview of Wisconsin geology and introduces you to some key concepts that will help you to fully appreciate the park's stories. And one of those concepts is the immense time scale covered in the book. I ask you to take yourselves out of our daily time frame that we divide into hours and minutes and seconds and to shift into that much larger frame that geologists know so well measured in centuries and millennia, millions and billions of years. There are five spans of time that we focus on briefly here just to set the stage. The first is the Pre-Cambrian. The first four billion of the Earth's four and a half billion year history. And it involved continental collisions that formed North America and in what would become Wisconsin, it involved a mountain building. Next is the 50 million year Cambrian period, a time when seas invaded our continent and life began to evolve in those seas. Now there had been seas in the Pre-Cambrian. More than one probably that invaded our area and had some forms of primitive microbial life in them, but the Cambrian seas as far as we know were the first ones to host complex multicellular life forms and to kick off the evolution of life in those seas. The third period is the next roughly 135 million years following the Cambrian in which more seas advanced into our area and life in those seas, evolution of life really took off during that next period. The next period is roughly 400 million years following the departure of the last sea that entered our area. And during that time erosion took over and wiped out the fossil record of that time. So for example, we do not know for sure if dinosaurs ever roamed in the famous Jurassic. They probably did, but we have no fossil record of dinosaurs because the erosion really wiped it out, especially in Wisconsin. And finally, the two and a half million year quaternary period, the ice age, time of the glaciers, and within the last 200,000 years the emergence of humans. Another key idea for understanding the park stories as well as we can is to know that the Wisconsin region for much of its history was tropical. I want to thank the UW Press for the use of this image. It was used by David Michelson and his co-authors in their great book Geology of the Ice Age National Scenic Trail. I don't know if any of you are familiar with that. It's a book. Long ago, early in its history, the Earth's crust was fractured into several large pieces called plates that were jostled and moved around on the planet like bumper cars in an amusement park. And the movement of these plates is called plate tectonics. The plate on which Wisconsin rode the North American plate in pre-Cambrian time was south of the equator. And due to plate tectonics, it took kind of a curly cue path over time. Crossed the equator heading north about 350 million years ago and kept shifting around and landed where it is now about 10 million years ago. But we're still moving as you may know. The North American plate is shifting roughly south west about as fast as our fingernails are growing. Not very fast. Beyond chapter 1, my book is organized into 5 by 5 regions with a chapter for each region. Now, every one of Wisconsin's 49 state parks and 10 state forests has a great story to tell. But I picked the 5 or 6 stories in each region that best represent the dynamic processes that occurred there. So let's just take a quick tour of the regions before we go to Colorado. The first is in the northwest corner of the state the bedrock up there is largely volcanic. That's Brownstone Falls up at Copper Falls State Park and the rock all around and under those falls is volcanic. The southeast corner of the state the parks lie on the remains of ancient sea creatures and sea plants that were converted to hard stone, hard rock and later unearthed by the glaciers and other processes. Forming features like these cliffs that make Door County famous this one at Peninsula State Park and here in the southeast corner of the state the rolling countryside is formed by glaciers molded features such as this cane cone shaped hill at the Kettle Moraine State Forest. In the south central region of the state where Gale and I live a variety of processes shaped the features many of them related to the glacier. For example even during glacial times during the short summer months water would flow into the cracks and crevices of rock and then during the long cold winters that water would freeze and expand and gradually pry rock pieces apart one from another and over centuries this freeze-taw cycle with its pickaxe effect literally sculpted features such as the balanced rock at Devil's Lake State Park. And finally in the southwest corner of the state the driftless area never invaded by glaciers the slow steady process of erosion formed features such as Eony Point at Governor Dodge State Park. It's a sandstone mass sculpted by wind and water erosion uninterrupted for hundreds of millions of years. And that's my son Will in the photo there he was helping me with pictures that day. Now each park story in the book has an introduction with more details on the geology and natural history of the area. In many cases I also include some early human history explaining how Native Americans lived in the park areas and why they too regarded them as special or even sacred. For example this is a tremolo mountain at the Perot State Park on the Mississippi and this is long been regarded as sacred by the whole chunk and so access to it is restricted and each story includes photos like some of those you're seeing here tonight and I took all but a couple of the photos in the book on my hikes in the parks and each story is also accompanied by one or more trail guides that I wrote up after hiking those trails. They preview for you what you will see on the trail like rock types and rock formations how they're changing now. You can think of a trail guide as one of those audio recordings you can listen to when you walk through a museum and it helps you understand what you're looking at. Also note that the editors at the press designed this book specifically to fit into a backpack so you can grab a park trail map and put the book in your backpack and hit the trails and play geologist. So let's do that now. Let's go through one of those time portals and see how you can use the book when you explore the parks. We are going on a hike through Kettle Moraine State Park just down the shore from here. What we'll see when we walk through this park is an extraordinary process including invasions by ancient seas that laid down thick layers of sandstone and dolomite. Rivers flowing and eroding that stone for millions of years crushing glaciers that gouged out the Great Lakes basins and the building grain by grain of expansive sand dunes and finally the growth of stately dune forests. Kolar-Hundry State Park is known for sprawling beach sprawling sand dunes creating beaches. Now here I want to take a minute to give special thanks to the friends of Kolar-Hundry State Park and I bet we've got a few of them here tonight. Anybody? Friends of Kolar-Hundry? Great. We owe those people a special debt for the hard work they've done to make Kolar-Hundry State Park what it is which is a wonderful place to study and learn about ecosystems, dune ecosystems and how they form. And I'll talk more about the dune formation later on. But to get to the beginning of this story we have to step back in time about two billion years to a time when mountains stood in northern Wisconsin. They were heaved up when two primitive continents collided about 1.9 billion years ago to form the new continent of America. Remember this region was tropical at the time so those mountains were desert like they were sandy tropical and desert like. And they might have resembled these peaks that you can see now at Big Bend National Park in Texas. So what do these old mountains to the north have to do with the dunes at Kolar-Hundry State Park? They founded where all the sand along the Lake Michigan shore comes from. Much of it comes from those mountains to the north that were there almost two billion years ago beginning at that time. Over millions of years winds scoured those highlands and streams and rivers brought the eroded sand and gravel down to seashores of invading seas to the area from the south. And those ancient seashores might have looked something like this mudflat now on the east coast of the United States. Over time several seas invaded and retreated and the streams that flowed to those seashores deposited deep layers of sand and as the sea would advance and would cover the shore that sand would be buried eventually by sediments and eventually cemented into sandstone. And then when a sea retreated that sandstone would eventually be exposed and eroded again into sand. And as those ancient seas advanced and retreated several times over hundreds of millions of years this cycle repeated itself again and again. And that's where much of that sand on the lakeshores comes from. When we went by life began to evolve rapidly in these seas that invaded our area in salurian time about 450 million years ago a sea floor probably looked a lot like this just teeming with life. This is a diorama on display in the Milwaukee Public Museum representing one of the planet's first coral reefs right here in southeastern Wisconsin. And the life there included a variety of creatures clinging brachyapods and crawling trilobites. These tall flower-like things called crinoids or sea lilies were actually animals and the chief predator in this system was this octopus type critter the cephalopod and some of these guys got to be very large up to 30 feet long they figure. The remains of such creatures collected on the sea floor for 300 million years or more and eventually became limestone which was then converted by undersea chemical reactions to dolomite a harder, more resistant cousin to dolomite to limestone. When the last of the ancient seas had departed our area this dolomite covered all of Wisconsin and layers up to three feet thick. But over the next 400 million years that long period of erosion much of it was carried away by wind water and ice erosion. In eastern Wisconsin however much of the dolomite remained as you probably know and today it forms the ridges and cliffs called escarpments the most famous of which is called the Niagara escarpment genetically represented at the cliffs of up on the cliffs of Dore County this one at Peninsula State Park. The Niagara escarpment runs from southeastern Wisconsin down below Lake Winnebago south of Lake Winnebago up through Dore County where it forms the backbone of the Dore Peninsula. And as you might know it's called the Niagara escarpment because that's us to Niagara Falls. To the east of us is the Michigan Basin which contains Lake Michigan lower peninsula of Michigan and most of Lake Huron and the escarpment the Niagara escarpment rims that basin represented by this red line it's mostly eroded or largely eroded and buried but it outcrops in a lot of different places including the northeast corner of Lake Winnebago along the Dore Peninsula and most famously on the border of New York and Ontario where the Niagara river thunders over the escarpment at Niagara Falls. Now in many areas of the Lake Michigan shore the Dolomite mantle has been eroded away exposing underlying layers of sandstone and lots of sand from here in Sheboygan right there the escarpment is to the west it's largely buried under glacial drift it's over in the region of Lake Winnebago but around Coer Andre State Park it's sand, sand and more sand and again that sand originally was found in the mountains that stood to the north one and a half billion years ago after the next part of the glacial geologic story about the park let's skip ahead to glacial times there were several glaciers during the roughly two and a half million year quaternary period some geologists think that as many as 15 major ice sheets came creeping down out of Canada the most recent one is called glaciation because our state contains some of the best examples in the world of what a glacier can do to the landscape each of those ice masses plowed up more of the underlying sandstone and sand pulverizing it and spreading a layer of sand across the Lake Michigan basin and as each glacier retreated streams gushed off of those glaciers and out from under the withering ice mass and deposited sand and gravel in what is called outwash and that too added to the sand and gravel that's in the basin over the thousands of years since the glass glacier retreated Lake Michigan's level has risen and fallen several times and this too has played a role in the formation of the sand dunes as the glacier was retreating from Wisconsin meltwater pooled in low areas forming glacial lakes that were bound on one or more sides by a retreating wall of ice and one of them was Lake Algonquin which about 12,000 years ago covered all of today's Lake Michigan and Lake Huron basins and it's deepest Lake Algonquin covered the Colorado State Park area including Sheboygan right around in here submerging them under 30 feet of icy water ice cold water the lakes currents and waves the glacial lakes currents and waves continue to shift loads of sand onto what would become today's beaches now the left side of this image shows Lake Algonquin about 12,000 years ago note that it's bigger than current day Lake Michigan which is outlined in this dark black line here then about 8,000 years ago the retreating glacier uncovered an outlet for water to drain to the northeast so a lot of that water drained away and the lake level then dropped as much as 300 feet below current levels which would have put Sheboygan pretty far inland from the lake now glaciers are so massive that they actually compress the land so as a glacier melted that compressed land slowly began to rebound and rise up and eventually it raised that northeast outlet enough to close it off and then water again began to the lake level again began to rise and by about 5,500 years ago another version of the lake called Lake Nipissing had again put all around the state park and Sheboygan area under about 15 to 20 feet of water 5,500 years ago today you can find evidence of those ancient beaches on many areas of the Lake Michigan shore here's a photo of an ancient abandoned lake shore cliff in the woods up at Newport state park on the north end of the door peninsula when the last glacier had gone and the last glacial lake drained away Lake Michigan was ringed by a deep massive sand that you see today being molded into dunes like these at Kohler-Andre state park when you visit Kohler-Andre if the wind is blowing the right way you can find a sandy area near the shore and watch what the wind does to the sand like Kohler-Andre's story explains this further first note that the waves are bringing sand to the shore where winds dry it and blow it further inland if you watch closely you might see wind blowing grains of sand landing on the leeward side of a piece of driftwood or a bush growing near the shore watch long enough and you will see these grains adding up to a small pile that becomes larger with continuing wind and you will be witnessing the birth of a sand dune and my book goes on to explain that the growth of the sand dune is a slow delicate process grain by grain wind blowing sand builds up builds a pile which itself becomes subject to the wind the pile mounts up asymmetrically like a water wave with a sloping westward windward side and a steeper leeward side and eventually it gets big enough so that a tiny avalanche occurs occurs on that steeper side and this moves the pile of sand a few inches inland and in this way by avalanching a dune slowly migrates inland while a new dune beginning forming dune takes its place down by the shore and as successive dunes form the deeper older inland dunes are shielded from the wind by the younger dunes near the lake and with sands on the older dunes shifting less certain plants can take hold on the surfaces first come grasses and then later more complex plants like creeping juniper and eventually shrubs and trees and in this way by plant succession forests can be developed on old dunes and it surprised me to learn that wetlands can even appear on dunes under certain circumstances winds can scour away enough sand to expose the water table and then groundwater seeps to the surface creating a place where sedges and grasses can grow other plants soon find that area and as they grow die and decay soil is formed and the first called a slack develops another feature of the dunescape is called a sand blow it occurs where the plant covering on a younger dune is uprooted and the sand is then exposed to winds that create an ever widening barren area and this can threaten the dune ecosystem human activities such as walking or climbing on the dunes building a fire there not much in the sand these kinds of things can cause that kind of damage that starts a sand blow at kohler-ondry state park the network of dunes of cord walks was built to preserve the dune ecosystem by guiding visitors around and away from those sensitive areas now all of these as all of these features were beginning to form as the last glacier was retreating to the north 11,000 years ago Native American people began to inhabit the ancient lake shores first came the nomadic paleo Indians who hunted the mastodon another big game along the shores of lake Algonquin by 5500 years ago groups of archaic Indians including copper culture people were fishing lake nipissings waters using spears and nets as well as hunting deer bear and smaller game in the dune forests about 3500 years ago early woodland tribes added gardening to their survival strategies raising corn, beans, squash and gourds and living in villages this is a replica of a dwelling in a village that's built by late woodland people between 1100 and 1500 years ago and this is on display at whitefish dunes state park north of here as I said before through the amazing process of plant succession forests can actually take hold on sand dunes I find that amazing and what makes it even more so is that coer andre state park hosts an unexpected and unusually diverse combination of forest types I'll do another reading from my book to sum up that story today coer andre state park features fledgling dunes thick dune forests and every phase of dune development between those extremes the park lies in what ecologists call the tension zone a band of terrain running southeasterly across the central part of the state that represents the transition between northern and southern forest types many northern forest type trees grow in the park because the moist cool conditions created by the big lake are similar to those found in the northern forest the trees include white and red pine yellow and white birch and certain oak species the southern forest type is represented in the park by beach, green ash balsam poplar, cottonwood and black walnut that's another reason this park is interesting to me it straddles the tension zone for excellent detailed information on all aspects of the park you can visit this sandaling nature center on the shore there at the park the creeping juniper nature trail loop departs from comes back to the nature center serves as a kind of an outdoor extension of the nature center it's well worth the effort to take this little half mile hike it's just loaded with information about flora and fauna and the history of the park area it provides one more way to realize what a treasure coaler andre state park is it's a beautifully preserved dune environment where you can enrich your soul setting on a lake michigan beach hiking through a fragrant dune forest or exploring among ancient dunes thank you I'd love to hear your questions if you have them and then when we're done grab some refreshments and I can sign copies of the book if you wish over there in addition to what the library folks provided us as you know gail brought some crunchy trilobites and brachypods they're ancient but they're really tasty so any questions it's a question I get a lot I like the question but it's hard to answer because it's like being asked who your favorite child is I've gotten to love them all for various reasons but if you push me a little bit I will say copper falls state park it's kind of up in my own stomping grounds up there in the northwest when you walk through the gates of that place you feel like you've walked back in time 100 million years that's my favorite anybody else yes the order of classes that are founded in northern Wisconsin in Michigan was that put there by the volcanoes that was put there by volcanic action if you ever heard of the mid-continent rift it was an opening up of the continent right up there right up through what would become the lake superior access of lake superior basin and 1.1 billion years ago that opened up a big plume of magma came up and just opened a crack in the earth and it was beginning to tear the continent in half like the rift in Africa is now east Africa something pushed that rift back together but the whole process took 50 million years or something from the time it started opening to when it started closing all that time lava was spurting up out of that crevice or rift and it was not like explosive volcanoes although there were some of those up there too but this slow emergence of basaltic lava spread this layer of basalt across all of northwestern Wisconsin and brought with it from deep in the earth deposits of copper, silver a few other minerals up there that's where the rich copper deposits came from there are no events of volcanoes or any other matters no events that I know of the question is are there indications of vents of volcanoes up in the far north and I don't believe there are indications of vents there's evidence of the rift and then there's the type of rock that you see on that slide that I showed of brownstone falls that's what they call red lava some people call it red lava I don't think that's the geologic term for it but that is that is volcanic though I take that I have read that they take that to mean an explosive volcano occurred in that area, that red lava rock that's what I understand so correct me if I'm wrong I have a place up in Iron County just south of early Guile Floyd area and there's a couple of trails and there's a couple of rocks that are half the size of a car with little rocks and they said those are blue from the volcano and it's superior and this is the big rock sitting I want to mention there were some explosive volcanoes along the rift they figured that they were scattered around explosive volcanoes they know that one occurred around Copper Falls because of that red rock and you said yours is places where? I'm just south of early south of early yeah I believe that yeah I believe that's right I believe that would have been another area the rift was 1.1 billion to 1 billion or something like that it wasn't that long yeah during that period I forgot to mention the iron deposits in response to the other question about mineral deposits iron came from a much earlier process that was back one of the pre-Cambrian seas more like 2 billion years ago the atmosphere changed this is how they figured the atmosphere changed because that iron precipitated out of whatever ocean was there at the time and deposited along the shore and was buried in those sands and eventually buried deep and that's where the iron came from but that was a much older deposit so yes yeah the question is how many state parks to Wisconsin have there are 49 state parks 10 state forests and then there's a whole bunch of things called state recreation areas some of them are a lot like state parks and of course there's state natural areas which are not parks but there are areas that are preserved in various states for study and so on that is a good question what makes a park versus a forest it kind of comes it's a mix of politics and budgetary budgetary politics well let me think which state forest point beach state forest they wanted to make that a state park but I think it was that one one of the state forests but because it was owned by another part of the state it wasn't owned by the DNR I think I'm sorry I can't give you the specifics but it was kind of determined by who owned what and then there was you know squabbling among the people and the government to turn it into a state park or a state forest wasn't squabbling but you know or just rules I guess so some things are state forests and they're almost like state parks and something like Kettle Moraine is almost like a state park and some state parks are more like state forests but so it's really a distinction more of artificial than real yeah the SRA is the state recreation areas all of those all the state owned properties hmm yes I get that question if I think there'll be any more state parks and I keep meaning to look into that to see if there's anything brewing I don't know of anything I'd love to see a state park up in the northeast part of the state where all those waterfalls are in Marinette County I don't know if you're familiar with those but there's some beautiful astounding beautiful waterfalls up there there could be a state park up there one would create a state park is it government or money a lot of the state parks came from land donated by wealthy individuals who said I want this to be a park and they gave it to the state you know that was Perot was that way um Paterson up on the on the superiors Corandre yeah exactly and Tommy Thompson and also they're also sometimes formed by kind of grassroots efforts I think this is I think this is pretty well through the interstate park the very first park that Wisconsin ever established was developed largely due to a grassroots effort to preserve and it was Minnesota, Wisconsin working together trying to think of another example of of a park that was organized by people but I'm sorry I can't think of it right now but yes oh yes oh sure that's Gail's favorite park where's Gail that's her favorite have you ever been over across on Iowa's site and there's a hike point that you can look out and you can see the Wisconsin River coming into the Mississippi there yes Iowa yeah the greater Iowa it's not very far from Perot's yeah it's right across the river I have been there a long time ago I need to go back again it's very pretty we were just there last summer I guess it was and it is I'm originally from that park from Iowa I lived down right on the Wisconsin River far from Perot's yeah Iowa seems a beautiful park anyone else yes you divided the state into five sections yeah I have the Northwest Copper Falls is volcanic and the eastern state park is dolamite and then the southwest was driftless and the southeast I don't have what it was and I don't have what the other was sure southeast I said that was the landforms were removed by glacier the southeast part of the state here is mostly glacially formed and then south central was kind of a mishmash because there's a whole bunch of state parks right in that area north of Madison, Devils Lake Mirror Lake, Tower Hill Natural Bridge whole cluster of parks beautiful little parks and some of them are in the driftless area some are out of it but they're all affected by the glaciers so that's kind of how I characterize the south central parks is formed by a variety of processes including glaciers sure and one other thing I want to mention in that regard Rib Mountain is kind of a tricky one I couldn't figure out what to do with the Rib Mountain it would fit in a lot of different it's a beautiful park it would fit in a lot of different categories but I put it in with the northeast because it's on really really hard rock that I'm blanking on it now the rock that well granite is part of the Mosany Hills and others nearby what's the one what is the rock at Devils Lake Quartzsite Quartzsite is largely what makes up Rib Mountain because it was heaved up above the granite the ancient granite so anyway that's an interesting part too anyone else yes sure Trempelo is part of Perot State Park Perot is a little isolated cluster of peaks that were formed in the same manner as the rest of the Driflus area and they were once part of the Perot and the rest of those peaks at Perot were once part of the Minnesota side of the Driflus the Mississippi River came down flowed north of Trempelo and then east of Perot State Park and then continued in its track it's in now but the Trempelo River came down out of those hills on the Wisconsin side brought a lot of sand and gravel dam across the Mississippi and diverted the water into some tributaries behind what sort of behind Perot State Park peaks and isolated them from the Minnesota side and they had already been isolated from the Wisconsin side by the broad Mississippi River Valley so it's this little group of stranded peaks I refer to them in the book as stranded peaks and Trempelo is the highest island the biggest island in the Mississippi I believe it's an island and it's surrounded by the Trempelo River and the backwaters of the Mississippi sacred ground to the Ho-Chunk pretty high it's 380 feet off the river river level I believe anything else that you're wondering about about Trempelo mountain it's got trails on it and I'm not sure I have to double-check on this used to be that you couldn't just go there without a ranger to guide you around because it was sacred ground to the Ho-Chunk and they didn't want people tramping all over it so anyway mm-hmm Trempelo yeah great little town oh it's real pretty go through Trempelo and go up the river about a mile on the road up the river there and it's right there go see it yes yeah the whole state was under water a lot of time I think there's some geologists who believe that in the northern very northwest most corner of the state wasn't covered much of the time but yeah it was covered many times the whole state was covered many times and that's why we had such thick layers of dolomite all over the state when the blast of the seas finally flowed away yes what creates a drumlin or an esker? a drumlin or an esker, oh great questions go to if you have time go to Ketelmoraine and you'll learn a lot about that been there? Ketelmoraine state forest? yeah yeah drumlin is that's one of the, I'll go with esker first an esker is left of an underground, under ice stream, a stream that was flowing along under the ice as it was melting and it was pretty much perpendicular to the wall, to the front, the ice front the wall, the margin of the glacier glacier and the stream would come down out of the, out from under the glacier and flow out it would be carrying sand and gravel that were embedded in the glacier melting out and it would each stream would just drop a whole load of sand and gravel along its bed and then as the, it would basically fill up the tunnel that was formed by the stream under the ice and when the glacier finally melted away, what was left was this sinuous ridge of sand and gravel and that's an esker, some of them are huge, some of you know, 100 feet up off the ground and some beautiful samples of that in Calamoraine the drumlin it took a glacier a glaciologist a while to figure out what formed drumlins and I think there might even still be some argument about it but the best explanation as I understand it, according to David Michelson and others who've studied this is that you know, under a glacier parts, some areas of the ground were frozen really hard and some were a little softer and wetter and so where the ice and the ground under it were rock hard as the glacier moved over that area, wait now let me think about this the ground, the ground was hard the ground was frozen solid, deep and as the glacier came plowing along it plowed away the softer, wetter stuff and when it ran into one of those chunks of really frozen hard soil it just kind of went up and over it like that, so it was carved by an advancing glacier and a drumlin, in case anybody doesn't know, is a teardrop shaped hill if you look at our spoon, a teardrop at the end of a spoon, the blunt end of the spoon or teardrop is where the glacier came and went up over and then it tapered off the back end to make it look like the back of the spoon and that's where drumlins came from, the state capitol is sitting on a drumlin Babcock, is it Babcock hill? the hill overlooking Lake Mendoza, that's a drumlin a lot of drumlins in the Madison area and sure, yeah and over here there's many drumlin fields did I answer your question? did I answer? yes I don't think that climate change would make much difference to the to the lake level I shouldn't say that because I haven't studied it but the seas are going to be rising because there's this enormous body of water in the ocean is expanding because the water is heating up as well as the atmosphere so just a little bit of heat in the ocean, it's it's just a little bit of heat in the ocean and all that water expands it makes a difference on the seashore and the other reason is because ice is melting off the land and adding to the water in the oceans the lakes there's not great lakes there isn't a lot of ice to melt into there isn't any ice really permanent ice to melt into them I don't believe increased temperature the water might expand the body of water a little bit but I don't know that it would make that big a difference to the lake it will affect the water temperature it could affect I should say the water temperature which will affect what fish can live in it trout have a real narrow band of temperature that they can tolerate so if it goes above their band of tolerable temperatures the trout won't like the great lakes and so climate change could affect the makeup of the fauna and flora I heard on a program a while back that Niagara Falls are going backwards are starting to drain faster no I haven't heard that one I have not heard that the flow of the falls is increasing with erosion from the action of the water and will drain faster I have not heard that any other questions great questions thank you nothing else yes I'm not what my nephew calls a rock biter some geologists actually bite rocks to help determine what they are I'm not a rock hound as much as I am fascinated by the processes how did this shape get here how did this canyon get here how did this waterfall get here so it's the geologic processes that I'm fascinated by and that just comes from my love of what I see in Wisconsin I've always gone out and explored in the wilds of Wisconsin and Minnesota in other areas of the country but mostly Wisconsin and I got training as a science writer I didn't have the attention span to be a scientist but I love to read about science and write about it so that's those two things I guess are what came together to make me want to do this yes I don't know I don't know what the reality is there are there's a nice program I think it's Stevens Point I'm not sure I went to St. Claude State when I went to state 2 maybe I'm not sure but Joe was Madison was proud about it River Falls had a major at one time but I don't know what the enrollments trends are I really don't know good question anybody else thank you