A Primer On Hudson Bay: For Those Tired Of Ice And Snow

In the last post we explored the fact that our last decade of winters have had some curious ups and downs.  For the most part, the last few northern United States winters have been relatively mild, with 2012 giving us 80's in March and 60's in the dead of the season.  Then we had an usual event for 2014, a brutal winter full of snow and ice and intense cold.  Again, we explored the details, and found out that we have seen some deep chills even in our better winters.  The truth is, they are part and parcel of life in the temperate zone, and we really need the cold to maintain our surroundings properly.  Ice and snow have wonderful ways of keeping things moderated, without which life could be much worse for the planet.  You see, we live on a round rock floating in an unforgiving interstellar space which is anything but moderate.  Move our distance from our star even slightly, we have problems.  Remove our protective layers of magnetic force and atmospheric gases, we have problems.  Remove either the stable water thermodynamics of our oceans or the vast land spaces of our continents, we have problems.  Remove the snow and ice...

Well do we have problems!  First and foremost, the thing to keep in mind about ice is that it is cold.  While this may seem to be rather obvious, think about what effect large masses of ice have on the waters and land which they freeze to a crisp.  There is a reason why northern Ontario has the furthest southern tundra in the world: Hudson Bay.  Here is a look at what that tundra, at the same latitude as Edinburgh, Scotland, looks like:



Yes, that amazing body of water is often frozen for the vast majority of the year.  Unlike the rest of the world ocean, Hudson Bay is only lightly saline, a condition partially held in check by the ice it generates.  The Bay is fed by a vast area of rivers and lakes draining into it, somewhere close to a third of all the water draining away in Canada and even a small amount of what escapes from the United States.  These waters are thus able to more easily freeze in the winter, and when they melt when summer finally does reach her, the mighty Hudson is able to keep the salt water at bay (no pun intended).  Like her perennial rival the Gulf of Mexico, the Hudson thus also influences the global circulation of water by adding fresher, colder water to the warm and salty mix elsewhere.  This role ensures that heat is transferred out of the Bay, especially during those heated months.  Masses of ice float around in the water even in August and September, and just like in the winter, they not only moderate the water temperature directly, but also reflect solar radiation back into space.

Needless to say, this has an effect on North American weather systems.  Although the heat and humidity factory of the Gulf of Mexico usually kicks that tar out of the Bay during summer months (worthy of another post), the ice-influenced lower temperatures of the place tend to keep a nice forty to fifty degree dome of cold air that occasionally pushes southwards enough to keep our continent from baking in a total Gulf Sauna.  You see, during the last ice age, the Bay actually reigned supreme in this regard; it kept on pumping out more and more ice as the climate cooled.  Over thousands upon thousands of years, the ice made enough progress to spread far to the south, and summer no longer had the same effect that it does today.  The ice started building up upon itself and, like a mountain, cooled off the rising air masses making their way over the higher elevations, at once cooling off the air and increasing the amount of precipitation to fall on it, which of course was snow.

This is the important part, now.

Snow and ice both reflect solar radiation, but snow has the added benefit of also insulating whatever it covers.  Snow on top of a glacier thus blankets the ice and keeps the temperatures beneath relatively stable.  On ground, this does the same thing, usually to the opposite effect of keeping the protected soil and associated life warmer than normal.  Back in January when we hit that terrible low of -16F, my underlying brown Michigan clay stayed at about 28F under a foot and a half of snow, thus saving my outlandish experiments in botanical curiosity.  Different experiments have revealed degrees of effectiveness in regards to insulation, but most findings report that every inch of snow gains us about 2 degrees F or so of protection.  In our continent of playful temperature shifts, this is sometimes responsible for allowing things as tender as palms (mostly Sabal Minor) from growing naturally as far north as Oklahoma and North Carolina.  Again, this is on the continent that also features Tundra as far south as Ontario.  Its the gift of our winters that enables us to have productive farmland well into Alberta or apples as far south as Florida.  We can have tundra in Ontario and freezes well into Mexico but we also don't have the brutal, crushing, seemingly eternal record low winters that Siberia gets.  If you ever think that this cold has been nuts, take a look over at the Russian continental deathly cold factory known as Verkhoyansk.  I dare you!  They don't have the same powerful melting cycle-climate changing power that Hudson Bay presents, and they definitely get a lot less snow than we do; the atmosphere just does not have a decent enough source of moisture to draw off of.

You see, ice cools through multiple means, and snow blankets.  Without them many species of plants would not flower, pollinators would be in an even worse shape than they already are, agriculture would suffer severely, and the deer would simply eat every seedling in sight that would otherwise be covered by snow.  There are so many benefits to having snow come along with the cold, the most excitable one this year being a chance to finally punch the emerald ash borer in the face.  Gradual melting of mountain packs in the Rockies and Sierras gives us the wonderful rivers that we have out west in the midst of some very hot and dry deserts.  A sudden rush of melting and spring rains means that the moisture does not benefit from the time released majesty that snow would provide.  I could go on, but that said, try chewing on this article by fellow blogger Johanna Dominquez:

The Benefits Of Snow!

Niagara Falls In The Winter

Can Niagara Falls freeze over as recent news reports have indicated?  If it gets cold enough, possibly, but this would have to be colder than cold, really.  One of the things that makes Niagara Falls so impressive is just how much water flows over her rim.  Think about it, the entire drainage of the Great Lakes is forced through this one outlet (The Chicago and Welland Canals are not permanently open) in a dramatic scene that is one of the last visual reminders we have of what life was like when the Laurentide Ice Sheet was in final stages this far south.  This is a lot of water to slow down enough to turn into a solid.  That said, there will be lots of ice in a decent winter for the very same reason.  Lake Erie has to put all that frozen water somewhere.  In periods of prolonged cold, like the winter of 1911, the river can be so jammed and frozen across that the flow gets severely restricted.  Piles of ice at the bottom of the falls and smaller flows over the rim will indeed form the illusion that the place is frozen over. 

So what does it look like otherwise, in a more typical winter?  Beautiful. 

That there bridge would be the Rainbow, with the buildings in the background being in Niagara Falls, NY.

Large chunks sometimes survive the fall and gather with other masses of ice which get trapped in the gorge to form icebergs.

Still quite a bit of flow on the American Falls, with the gorge walls being coated nicely in ice enough to look like the falls are frozen.  This is water frozen into place on the rock face, rather than the falls themselves.

The Niagara Gorge itself is pretty impressive this time of year, let alone at any other time.

Looking back into Ontario (from Ontario actually) we see a less than frozen Horseshoe Falls.  Considering the amount of water that flows over this thing, it would be next to doomsday if it were truly frozen.  That huge volume of mist sure does freeze on the way through the air though, coating everything nearby with a decent amount of rime. 

 Winter is actually a pretty decent time to come explore the falls and surrounding area if you want to beat the crowds.  For bird lovers, the almost guaranteed open waters and fishy smells (a lot of fish get sucked into this discharge) wafting into the air by the powerful mists attracts the world's largest known gathering of nearly 20 Gull species every winter.  The water and smells are just as powerful on human gatherers too, with the senses being delighted by the magic of liquid water in an otherwise frozen time of the year.  The place almost always smells like fish, but not in a bad way, more like in a refreshing next-to-the-ocean sort of way, which is great because this is not even saltwater. 

These pictures were all taken in February of 2013.

Our Great Ancient Highways: The Ottawa River (Natural History)

The Ottawa River is a no-contest winner for being the most important river in Canadian history.  From its beginnings as a great glacial drain to its current predicament as a border between Quebec and Ontario, this river has served as a conduit for quite a lot of energy, both natural and human.

While are not exactly sure how old the Ottawa River is, we do know that it sits within a 175 million year old rift, the Ottawa-Bonnechere Graben.  The rift lies within much older rock, the Grenville Province of the Canadian Shield.  While some parts of the Shield include the oldest surface rock on the planet, dating back to four billion years ago, the Grenville portion, which includes the Laurentian and Adirondack Mountains, is actually much younger, at a "mere" 1-2 billion years of age.  The edges of the rift are pretty easy to come across, namely on the southern edge, which forms rises of elevation nearly 1,000 feet in height along the middle Petawawa River, one of the largest tributaries of the Ottawa...

The tallest portion of the southern edge of the rift can be found alongside Cedar Lake in Ontario.  The peaks of the range are nearly 1,000 feet above some of the surrounding lower elevations.  At this latitude, what would account for only minor changes further south becomes an interesting collection of transitions within the boreal world.  The ridge also causes a slight rain shadow and alters weather patterns on Cedar Lake, a very turbulent body of water for its size.

As well as the northern edge, which can be seen all along the Ottawa River, particularly in the Gatineau Hills north of Ottawa, and the peaks of the Laurentians across from Mattawa and Deep River, Ontario...

The Ottawa River in a more or less natural state at the confluence of the Ottawa and Mattawa Rivers.  The opposite shore is the north fault wall of the rift.

The Brent road, near  Deux-Rivières, Ontario, looking north.  The ridge in the background is the north edge of the Ottawa Valley.  Seen here are typical pine forests of the lower elevations of the valley.  White (Pinus Strobus), Red (Pinus Resinosa), and Jack (Pinus Banksiana) Pines thrive in the incredible masses of sand which are found here.  The pines formed the backbone of the early Canadian logging industry.

Going forward to about 10,000 years ago, give or take a few thousand years, the Laurentide Ice Sheet was melting.  As she gave up her immense volume of water, she first found outlets in the ancient Mississippi River system, and then in the primordial Great Lakes, where she also left much of her aquatic bounty.  Eventually though, the warmer world defeated her persistence in a conflict that continues to this day between the Gulf of Mexico and Hudson Bay, a conflict which gives eastern and central North America some of the most regularly dramatic weather on the planet.   Her last major drain before emptying back onto herself and into far more northerly realms was the Ottawa River system.  Where once a continental glacier had emptied its meltwaters into the vast drainages further south, it was now forcing itself into a comparatively minor river system.  One can only imagine what that much water, "a thousand Niagaras", would have been like gushing through the Ottawa, Petawawa, Barron, and Bonnechere Rivers.  So much water emptied out here that the Atlantic Ocean briefly stretched inward as far as Pembroke, Ontario in an arm called the Champlain Sea.  We can only imagine...

We do know one consequence though.  The ice sheet left us sand.  A LOT of sand.

The best sand on earth, in your author's opinion, and he has taken in some fine sand in the tropics and deserts.  I even wrote a post about it.  The Ottawa Valley is full of it, especially from Mattawa and downstream, as well as along its major rivers named above.  Even down past Ottawa where the river gets a bit more broad and even slightly "southern" looking, in parts even refusing to expose its granite underbelly, there is sand to be found.  This sand, in fact, supports some of the easternmost natural prairie in North America.  The pines like it, the birches and aspens tolerate it, but nothing can handle large, flat, hot stretches of sand like grasses and friends of grasses.  Well, I suppose the pines like it as much as the grasses.

The Brent road, one of the many wilderness roads that one can take to easily explore the dense pine lands.  

That's pretty much what is underneath the Ottawa, and what it flows through.  Sand and lots of Canadian Shield stuff, mostly granites, gneisses, and even gabbros.  Down between Ottawa and its mouth near Montreal one runs into some limestone, but for the most part this is a Shield River through and through.  The water is as black as tea in many reaches, a gift of the dense forests and bogs that feed it, very much different from many of the silt laden rivers that drain the rest of the continent.  Like them, however, the river is very wide for much of its length.  The Ottawa passes through a variety of landscapes as a result, including the boreal forest, the transitional forests, pine barrens and remnant prairies, urban and rural areas, and some desolate looking sand spits and beaches that remind the explorer that even with all this water around, we tend to remain a somewhat drier continent.  For the most part, a trip up or down the Ottawa is a trip in the north country, with a few tastes of the rest of the northeastern continent.

Over her short 790 miles, the Ottawa only descends about 1,100 feet, (a descent over a comparatively steeper gradient than the Mississippi's, albeit of equal elevation) but she used to have some pretty intense rapids in places until they were dammed over in the last half century or so.  As such, the Ottawa was never really an ocean-accessible river like the Mississippi or Colorado were, at least not for larger vessels beyond canoes or logging rafts.  For the canoes and rafts, though, it was a very, very attractive road indeed, which we will explore in the next post.

Distant Cousins

While the corners of North America can often seem worlds apart in terms of climate and landscape, our continent is notable for having more similarities than differences between its distant ends.  White-tailed Deer (Odocoileus Virginianus) can be found both in Veracruz and central Quebec, various spruces and firs range from Alaska to the Appalachians, and even the rocks beneath us can remind the lonely traveler of a distant home.  Take a look at the scenes below:

Nope, that's not actually Canadian Shield!

While these might seem to have been taken in, say, Maine or Ontario, they were actually snapped (poorly, I know, I had yet to master the art of windshield photography) in central Utah.  The mountains of Utah and neighboring Colorado pull off Boreal artistry rather nicely despite being 1,000 miles south of the true Boreal forest.  Rather than Balsam Fir (Abies Balsamea) and White Spruce (Picea Glauca) we see spires of Subalpine Fir (Abies Lasiocarpa) and Engelmann Spruce (Picea Engelmannii), and the granites, schists, and gabbros of these relatively young mountains are old, but only recently exposed and not nearly as old as the ancient outcrops of the Canadian Shield rocks of the same names.

The western mountains, you see, are youngsters that rose less than 80 million years ago.  The life which thrives on their slopes, however, probably shares common ancestry with lower elevation life in similar climactic areas much further north.  During the last major glaciation, when the Boreal forests were much further south, these forests interacted with the northern versions at much closer proximity.  These days they are a bit more isolated, but serve as a unique southern extension of the northern forests well into central Mexico.  We are blessed and cursed, in a way, to have such a unique continent that features north-south mountain ranges and winters and summers both that can move uncontested far beyond where they can in other parts of the world.  The two worlds of alpine and true Boreal meet in the Canadian Rockies in a strikingly subtle mingling of separately evolved worlds.  Though I have never been to this grand meeting place of north and west, I can imagine that the sensations would be nothing short of incredible and perhaps even something reminiscent of a more unified continent that had to face much colder conditions as a tighter biological entity.  Again though, the differences are not too far apart from one another.  Take a look at a similar stretch of forest:

Taken off of Michigan 35 halfway between Menominee and Escanaba, MI.  

The casual viewer might not even notice a difference, even though the Utah and Michigan scenes are 1,300 miles apart.  With the exception of some aspens, none of the trees are of the same species between the two scenes, and the air in both places has rather different qualities to it.  Still, there is a little bit of Utah in Michigan and a little bit of Michigan in Utah, relations which have common roots in a more severe past.

Algonquin's Natural History: The Canadian Shield and Wisconsonian Glaciation

Most working scientific theories of the age of the earth suggest that the planet was formed about 4.5 billion years ago, though we have no conclusive evidence of anything on this planet to demonstrate that she is older than 4.2 billion years of age.  The oldest rocks we have are from one of the most stable and large masses of continental core of anywhere on the planet, the Canadian Shield.  Radiometric dating has been used to determine that some gneiss near Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories of Canada is close to 4.2 billion years old, pre-dating the creation of life itself on our planet.  Billions of years of erosion have mostly knocked away any great heights that would have covered what now juts up through the earth.

Come back in September for some pictures!

The portions that are exposed today are incredibly tough stuff, having endured travels over the globe, a lot of weather, multiple ice ages, and even being under oceans at certain points in time.  While they are hardly as grand as the Rockies or other such mountain ranges, what does remain of the Canadian Shield mountains, such as the Laurentians and Adirondacks, are far from unimpressive, considering as how they are often taller and more rugged than much younger mountains in the Appalachians and Ozarks, which have been worn down to the same size in a much smaller time scale.  In Algonquin, the mountains often have a prominence of about 700 feet, resting on a base of about 1,000 feet, enough to give a hefty hiker heart problems and enough to change weather patterns in the area, complete with a lusher western region and a drier rainshadow to the east.  We can only imagine what these would have looked like over a billion years ago, when they might have well exceeded 40,000 feet in height.

Come back in September for some more pictures.

Much more can be said about the Canadian Shield, but that is content best left for future posts.  The important thing to leave here is that Algonquin has very old rocks, young as far as the shield goes (between a billion and two billion years old, but there are probably much older rocks that have yet to be found in her depths), rocks that are often exposed and make the landscape very rugged, akin to much more vertical terrain like the Sierras or Rockies.  That said, Algonquin also has very grand forests, and most trees require at least a little bit of soil on top of the bedrock in order to survive.  So, what lies on top of the bedrock?

More rock!  Here and there are ancient traces of limestone from hundreds of millions of years ago.  Young by Shield standards, but remnants of a very different undersea tropical era for Algonquin.

Thanks again to the McElroys, who have a wonderful article on this little limestone peninsula on Cedar Lake at  http://www.mcelroy.ca/notes/brent_limestone_cliff.shtml.

Here we see some rock that looks out of place in Algonquin, but would very much be at home, say, in the Niagara Escarpment or in the Allegheny Mountains.  While the glaciers of several ice ages did a pretty good job of liberating the Shield rocks by scraping the ground bare, some areas managed to survive the onslaught.

That said, when the glaciers did retreat they left some stuff behind, sometimes ground up into a nice till and even dragged north from areas further to the south that they also did a number on.  Glacial till, as we mentioned a few posts back, makes for lovely forests and terrible crop field.  It is gray, sandy feeling, and often quite cold even in the summer and under full sun.  The glaciers left a bit more than till around, however, namely sand and water.  So what's the deal with those glaciers, anyway?

Source: USGS, at  http://esp.cr.usgs.gov/info/eolian/task2.html.

The last major ice sheet that covered North America is known as the Laurentide Ice Sheet, and was over 5,000 feet thick in some interior portions of its range.  For a long time, it would slowly advance southwards, melting a little in the summer, growing back bigger and better in the winter.  Whenever it melted it sent A LOT of water towards the ocean, normally either right into big blue or down the primordial versions of the Columbia and Mississippi rivers.  Along with immense volumes of water would rush small-grained silt, clay, and lovely, lovely sand.  The loess areas seen on the map below are the results of this material blowing around in the dry winters when the floods diminished.

Eventually, about 8,000 years ago, the Laurentide sheet kept melting north as the planet warmed up closer to where we sit today.  While the Mississippi continued to take quite a load of melt with it (you can find many rocks from Lake Superior almost all the way down the Mississippi on her banks), new outlets opened up, namely various predecessors of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence watershed.  One of these outlets was through the north of Algonquin, and it cut all sorts of interesting lakes, canyons, and such in its path.  It also left behind sand, sand that is without a doubt the best in the universe.  It has such a lovely consistency and softness that it became the sand of choice at the recent Olympic games in London.  Britain might not have the sand for volleyball, but Ontario came through for them.

Come back for pictures of this amazing sand.  I will have lots of them.

Then the glaciers left... and were followed by conifers, birches, willows, and... cacti?