The Maumee Torrent, also known as the Maumee Megaflood, was a catastrophic draining of

Lake Maumee Lake Maumee was a proglacial lake and an ancestor of present-day Lake Erie. It formed about 17,500 calendar years, or 14,000 Radiocarbon Years Before Present (RCYBP) as the Huron-Erie Lobe of the Laurentide Ice Sheet retreated at the end of the W ...

, the ancestor of present-day

Lake Erie Lake Erie ( "eerie") is the fourth largest lake by surface area of the five Great Lakes in North America and the eleventh-largest globally. It is the southernmost, shallowest, and smallest by volume of the Great Lakes and therefore also has t ...

, that occurred approximately 14,000 to 17,000 years ago during the late

Wisconsin glaciation The Wisconsin Glacial Episode, also called the Wisconsin glaciation, was the most recent glacial period of the North American ice sheet complex. This advance included the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, which nucleated in the northern North American Cor ...

. It happened when the waters of Lake Maumee, possibly in response to an advance of the ice front at the eastern end of the lake, overtopped a "

sag SAG, SAg, or sag may refer to: Land formations * Sag (geology), or ''trough'', a depressed, persistent, low area * Sag pond, a body of water collected in the lowest parts of a depression People * Ivan Sag (1949–2013), American linguist ...

" or low spot in the Fort Wayne

Moraine A moraine is any accumulation of unconsolidated debris (regolith and rock), sometimes referred to as glacial till, that occurs in both currently and formerly glaciated regions, and that has been previously carried along by a glacier or ice shee ...

, which was a deposit of glacial debris that acted as a natural dam at the site of present-day

Fort Wayne, Indiana Fort Wayne is a city in and the county seat of Allen County, Indiana, United States. Located in northeastern Indiana, the city is west of the Ohio border and south of the Michigan border. The city's population was 263,886 as of the 2020 Censu ...

. This unleashed a massive flow of water that scoured a one- to two-mile-wide outlet running southwest to the

Wabash River The Wabash River ( French: Ouabache) is a U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map accessed May 13, 2011 river that drains most of the state of Indiana in the United States. It flows fro ...

known as the "Wabash-Erie Channel", which probably followed the course of earlier, less massive drainage. The channel, now a small stream called the

Little River Little River may refer to several places: Australia Streams New South Wales *Little River (Dubbo), source in the Dubbo region, a tributary of the Macquarie River *Little River (Oberon), source in the Oberon Shire, a tributary of Coxs River (Hawk ...

, is the largest

topographical Topography is the study of the forms and features of land surfaces. The topography of an area may refer to the land forms and features themselves, or a description or depiction in maps. Topography is a field of geoscience and planetary sci ...

feature in

Allen County, Indiana Allen County is a county in the U.S. state of Indiana. As of the 2020 Census, the population was 385,410, making it the third-most populous county in Indiana. The county seat and largest city is Fort Wayne, the second largest city in Indiana. ...

. As much as 30 feet of fine sand, silt and organic sediments were deposited in the channel before drainage reversed and was captured by the present-day

Maumee River The Maumee River (pronounced ) ( sjw, Hotaawathiipi; mia, Taawaawa siipiiwi) is a river running in the United States Midwest from northeastern Indiana into northwestern Ohio and Lake Erie. It is formed at the confluence of the St. Joseph and ...

U.S. Route 24 U.S. Route 24 (US 24) is one of the original United States highways of 1926. It originally ran from Pontiac, Michigan, in the east to Kansas City, Missouri, in the west. Today, the highway's eastern terminus is in Independence Township, Mic ...

between Fort Wayne and Huntington follows the channel.Water Resource Availability in the Maumee River Basin, Indiana, pages 37 & 48
Water Resource Assessment 96-5, Indianapolis: Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Division of Water (1996) Approximately 14,000 years before present, Lake Maumee overtopped the

Fort Wayne Moraine The Fort Wayne Moraine is considered contemporary to the last stages of the Valparaiso Moraine. Centered on Fort Wayne, Indiana, the northern leg of the moraine is mostly overlaid by the younger Wabash Moraine angling northeastward through Williams ...

. The flood removed all earlier sediment and deepened the valley bottom by . Lake Maumee had reached above sea level when the lake poured through a sag in the Fort Wayne Moraine into the ancestral Little River and then the

. There is some evidence that the final rise in lake level that caused it to overtop the moraine was caused by a minor re-advance of the glacier further east in the basin. The soft till of the moraine was quickly eroded by the volume of water in the lake, releasing a massive volume of water. A second outlet opened at Six-Mile Creek into the St. Marys River and into the Little River Valley. The earlier sediments were removed in bulk, leaving only the Sand Point and a few gravel terraces on the valley walls. The flood scoured the length of the Wabash River. The limestone bedrock under the Little River Valley near Huntington created a sill, limiting the depth to which the Torrent and the future river could erode. The well-developed beach ridges in

Ohio Ohio () is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. Of the fifty U.S. states, it is the 34th-largest by area, and with a population of nearly 11.8 million, is the seventh-most populous and tenth-most densely populated. The sta ...

and eastern Allen County show a series of lower lake levels.

References

External links

Indiana Geological Survey: Allen County - A Geologic Atlas

Rich Clark and Scott Russell Sanders, ''Wild and Scenic Indiana'', San Francisco: Brown Trout Publishers, 2005, p. 67.
{{ISBN, 0-7631-8464-0 Geological history of the Great Lakes Floods in the United States Geology of Indiana Geography of Allen County, Indiana Geography of Huntington County, Indiana Megafloods