HOW MANY LOGS MAKE A FORESTPf

• Main Authors: Martin Paul S, Knowledge Bank Kb. Osu. Edu, Paul S. Martin
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Goldthwait; Ice Sheet
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.614.7343

The nature of ice-margin conditions is a durable problem in paleoecology. In a recent contribution Goldthwait (1958) and Burns (1958) provide a valuable stratigraphic account of wood from Wisconsin and post-Wisconsin age deposits in Ohio. From glacial till they report abundant records of spruce logs, less often of larch and white cedar, that indicate relatively short distance of transport by the Wisconsin glacier near its margin. Seventeen radiocarbon dates of this wood from 27,500 to 16,560 years ago bracket the last Wisconsin glacial maximum. Goldthwait (p. 213) concludes that, locally, the ice sheet pushed into extensive patches of living forest climatologically akin to those of north central Ontario. Burns (p. 223) interprets this as a relatively narrow band of coniferous forest, mainly spruce. To support the concept of a narrow coniferous zone, he cites Braun's postulate of deciduous forest fifty miles south of the drift border (Braun, 1951). The query raised by my title now emerges. Are abundant broken logs em-bedded in till prima-facie evidence that ice moved through and buried a closed