Lake Tight, named for geologist William G. Tight, was a glacial lake in what is present-day

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 ...

Kentucky Kentucky ( , ), officially the Commonwealth of Kentucky, is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States and one of the states of the Upper South. It borders Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to the north; West Virginia and Virginia ...

, and

West Virginia West Virginia is a state in the Appalachian, Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States.The Census Bureau and the Association of American Geographers classify West Virginia as part of the Southern United States while the B ...

, during the

Ice Age An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Earth's climate alternates between ice ages and gre ...

the early

Pleistocene The Pleistocene ( , often referred to as the ''Ice age'') is the geological epoch that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations. Before a change was finally confirmed in ...

before 700,000 years.

History

Lake Tight's origins date to nearly 2 million years before the modern era. As the Ice Age began to cool the

Earth Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to harbor life. While large volumes of water can be found throughout the Solar System, only Earth sustains liquid surface water. About 71% of Earth's surfa ...

, and large

glacier A glacier (; ) is a persistent body of dense ice that is constantly moving under its own weight. A glacier forms where the accumulation of snow exceeds its ablation over many years, often centuries. It acquires distinguishing features, such as ...

s began to creep south from modern-day

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

, many landforms and features were changed or destroyed, including the Teays River. The Teays had been a river for several million years, flowing north out of the

Appalachian Mountains The Appalachian Mountains, often called the Appalachians, (french: Appalaches), are a system of mountains in eastern to northeastern North America. The Appalachians first formed roughly 480 million years ago during the Ordovician Period. They ...

in what is now

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. The river's path traveled through modern-day

Indiana Indiana () is a U.S. state in the Midwestern United States. It is the 38th-largest by area and the 17th-most populous of the 50 States. Its capital and largest city is Indianapolis. Indiana was admitted to the United States as the 19th s ...

, and

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, finally emptying into the

Gulf of Mexico The Gulf of Mexico ( es, Golfo de México) is an ocean basin and a marginal sea of the Atlantic Ocean, largely surrounded by the North American continent. It is bounded on the northeast, north and northwest by the Gulf Coast of the United ...

, which at the time extended to southern Illinois. The glaciers of the Ice Age soon began to block the Teays, effectively

dam A dam is a barrier that stops or restricts the flow of surface water or underground streams. Reservoirs created by dams not only suppress floods but also provide water for activities such as irrigation, human consumption, industrial use ...

ming the river and forming Lake Tight, near what is now Chillicothe, Ohio. The lake has been the repeated topic of research over the past 100 plus years. In geologic terms, the lake's life span was short; the lake appears to have formed in the Lower or Middle Pleistocene. The reverse polarity of the clays points to an age greater than 700 ka, thus

Pre-Illinoian The Pre-Illinoian Stage is used by Quaternary geologists for the early and middle Pleistocene glacial and interglacial periods of geologic time in North America from ~2.5–0.2 Ma (million years ago). North America As the oldest stage in th ...

. At its greatest size, the lake was approximately deep, and in size (nearly two-thirds the size of

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 h ...

). When the lake finally overflowed, it created new drainage channels and

river A river is a natural flowing watercourse, usually freshwater, flowing towards an ocean, sea, lake or another river. In some cases, a river flows into the ground and becomes dry at the end of its course without reaching another body of w ...

s flowing south, in the opposite direction of the Teays River. A recent study in 2014 using Geographic Information System (GIS) Technologies, has redefined the extent of Proglacial Lake Tight.Erjavec, J., 2014. New Estimates of the Areal Extent of Pleistocene Lake Tight Based on GIS Mapping and Analysis. GSA Abstracts with Programs, v. 46, no. 3. Using National Elevation Datasets (NEDs) from the USGS, the author incorporated the 275-meter (902-foot) contour elevations into a GIS, spatially correlated the contours with Ohio Department of Natural Resources' GIS glacial, geologic, and topographic datasets, and developed a revised lake boundary that shows the areal extent of Proglacial Lake Tight was approximately 40% larger than has been previously estimated, covering some 25,740 km² (9,940 sq mi). This revised boundary shows that Lake Tight was as large as Lake Erie at its greatest extent. Mapped deposits of the Minford Silt Member of the Teays Formation provide strong evidence for the GIS revised boundary of Proglacial Lake Tight; the Minford's distribution, especially in tributary valleys at the lake's fringes, is compelling evidence for the GIS Lake Tight model.

References

External links

Ohio's Ancient Nile
{{DEFAULTSORT:Tight Former lakes of the United States Geology of West Virginia Geology of Ohio Geology of Kentucky Glacial lakes of the United States

History

See also

References

External links