Speaker: Eric Carson, Professor and Quaternary Geologist, Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey
The Driftless Area of southwest Wisconsin has been a peopled landscape for more than 12,000 years, changing as climate has changed in the millennia since the last major glaciation. The geologic record preserved and exposed in the Driftless Area tells of a myriad of worlds that have existed in this place extending back into Deep Time: wind-swept tundras that greeted the first people, great river systems that pre-date our modern Mississippi River, shallow tropical seas, all the way back to barren wave-washed beaches in a time before life on land had evolved. This talk will discuss Deep Time and the records of past landscapes of today’s Driftless Area.