Discover how the Midcontinent Rift helped form the magical and spectacular Lake Superior
Discover how the Midcontinent Rift helped form the magical and spectacular Lake Superior
How the billion-year-old Midcontinent Rift helped form Lake Superior.
Courtesy of Northwestern University (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Transcript
SETH STEIN: Lake Superior is a spectacular, almost magical, place. It has a sense of remoteness, wilderness, and mystery. It's so different from the rest of the Midwest. Many people know Lake Superior is the world's largest freshwater lake. But they may not realize that underneath the lake lays an enormous rift that almost tore North America apart about 1.1 billion years ago, long before dinosaurs roamed the earth.
Carol and I have been coming to the Lake Superior area for more than 30 years to hike, kayak, and cross country ski, but never thought much about it as geologists. However, I recently helped start a huge National Science Foundation program in which hundreds of geologists are studying North America and how it evolved.
As part of that program, we and others are learning on a lot more about the Lake Superior Area, and how it results from a huge geologic structure.
CAROL STEIN: The mid-continent rift is an 1,800-mile-long scar, along which North America started to tear apart, but for some reason failed to form a new ocean. This huge geologic structure gave rise to the area's water-based history, produced the rich copper deposits that shaped its growth, and set the stage for today's tourist industry.
The mid-continent rift formed by plate tectonics, which is how the earth works, and why it differs from our neighboring planets. The earth's outer shell consists of continent and ocean-sized moving plates of cold, strong rock, about 60-miles thick, that move at speeds of a few inches a year. About the speed that our fingernails grow.
Because the plates move relative to each other their shapes change with time. Continents come together to form supercontinents, and then they break apart in a process called, rifting. During the rifting, the earth's crust stretches and starts to break along newly formed faults.
And a rift valley forms as blocks of crust move downward and the material below flows sideways. Rifting is like what happens if you pull a candy bar that has an outer chocolate shell and a nugget interior. The chocolate layer breaks, and the inside stretches, and bends downward.
Today, the East African Rift is splitting Africa into two plates, forming a long rift valley and causing volcanoes like Mount Kilimanjaro. That's how the mid-continent rift looked 1.1 billion years ago, except with a lot more volcanic rock. Of course there were no lions, giraffes, trees, or even grass, because they had not yet evolved.
Successful rifts break continents apart and form new deep oceans. However, for reasons that we really don't understand, some rifts fail when rifting stops before a new ocean basin forms. That's what happened here. The mid-continent rift is a long belt of volcanic and sedimentary rocks with two major arms meeting in the Lake Superior Area.
One arm extends south westward all the way to Oklahoma, and maybe a little farther south. The other southeastern arm extends through Michigan, and all the way through Alabama. Today most of the rift is buried under younger rocks and sediments. But around the Lake Superior Area there are lots of places, especially in the national and state parks, where we can see this majestic geological structure.
One of the best places to see the rift is along the St. Croix River on the Wisconsin-Minnesota border. Here the river has cut through a huge stack of lava flows from the rift. These are the rift's signature rocks. They're volcanic rocks, which we're not used to seeing in the Midwest.
They're flood basalts, volcanic rocks that poured out of the earth's surface. These lavas are 1.1 billion-year-old versions of the modern lava flows that we see in active volcanoes like in Hawaii. Over about a 20-million-year period they fill the Rift Valley with hundreds of lava flows.
The weight of the lava caused the valley to sink, and sediments fell into the valley carried by the rivers. When eruptions resumed more lava layers were laid down and the cycle went on and on.
WILLIAM ROSE: What we see is fairly big cobbles. They're rounded, they probably moved down as debris flows down the slope-- very, very steep slopes. So when the rift opened and made this giant crack on the earth, the whole sides of the rift, the upper parts of the continent above them, begin to cascade down and to fill the Rift Valley.
CAROL STEIN: Later on, other sedimentary rocks were deposited above the rift derived sediments, making some of the most beautiful colored cliffs around the lake.
GREGORY WAITE: So the basalt like these that are all around me here have a lot of iron and magnetite-- so magnetized minerals. That makes them very dense and highly magnetized, compared to the background rocks, regular rocks. So we can measure the differences in density of the rocks using an instrument like this.
This is called a gravimeter. It's like a very sophisticated bathroom scale. And it's capable of measuring very minute differences in Earth's gravitational pull. And those differences are due in part to the density differences in the rocks below.
So geologists and geophysicists have used these techniques to map out the extent of the rift beyond Lake Superior, all the way down through Wisconsin, Minnesota-- even down all the way to Oklahoma. And then, on the eastern arm of the rift, it goes down through Michigan, Ohio, and even as far as Alabama.
SETH STEIN: To see the rift underground, geologists use seismic waves, sound waves traveling through rocks, like the way doctors use ultrasound to see inside patients.
To survey the Lake Superior region, scientists used the sound source towed behind a boat to generate seismic waves. The waves traveled down, reflect off interfaces of depth between different rocks, and return to the surface where they're detected by seismometers. Based on the waves' travel time, computers generated an image of the rock layers.
A north-south cross-section shows a deep u-shaped basin under Lake Superior filled by layers in volcanic rocks, and overlying sediment, to a depth of 18 miles, which is much deeper than Lake Superior's average depth of about 500 feet. To understand how the rift evolved geologists have been looking at how all the different pieces are put together.
The most important clue we have is that here on the south shore of Lake Superior all the lava layers are dipping to the north under the lake. On the north side of the lake, for example at Isle Royale National Park, all the layers are dipping the other way, south, under the lake. This tells us that there's a huge depression and that Lake Superior runs right down the middle of it.
The sediments above volcanic rocks also dip toward the center of the lake, and both of these can be traced through very, very long distances.
Scientists still don't know exactly how the mid-continent rift formed, or why the rifting process ended before forming a new ocean. Here's our current idea of how this happened. The rift formed when the earth's crust pulled apart, forming major faults. As the extended crust thinned the mantle below it rose up. Volcanoes poured lava flows over the surface, which filled the growing depression.
After rifting stopped, and the faults became inactive, the basin continued to sink as the crust cooled, and lava kept pouring out over the surface. Once the volcanic activity ended, thick sediments filled the basin above the lava flows and the basin kept sinking under their weight. After the sinking stopped, beautiful flatlines sediment seen in places like the Apostle Islands were deposited.
Eventually the area was compressed by distant collisions uplifting the volcanic rocks, which is why we see them as the dramatic vistas at the surface today. The Lake Superior Area illustrates the idea of geoheritage. How geology influences in areas' growth and culture.
Although Lake Superior itself was sculpted by much more recent glaciers, most recently about 10,000 years ago, its location reflects the geometry of the ancient rift. Because the soft sediment filling the rift is much easier to erode than the harder basalt. This gave the region's first transportation system, which was used by Native Americans, and is still crucial today.
European settlers and traders used the lake to import and export trade goods. Lake fisheries were significant, first commercially, and now recreationally. And the lake remains an economic engine today. The port of Duluth Superior, by far the largest and busiest on the Great Lakes, handles an average of 38 million tons of cargo, and nearly 1,000 ship visits each year, connecting the heartland of the US and Canada to the rest of the world.
The lake also generates water related tourism, bringing millions of visitors each year. The rift also caused mineral deposits. Hot water rising through the rift volcanic rocks dissolved copper and deposited it in concentrations that became sources of valuable ore. These deposits were mined, first by Native Americans, and later by European settlers.
JAMES BROWN: One of the principal deposits in the east is located in Lake Superior, particularly Isle Royale, which is in the middle of Lake Superior, and the southern shore, particularly on the Keweenaw Peninsula, which is the thumb that sort of sticks up from the southern shore.
The best evidence for the use of copper comes from the pits. There were excavated by ancients. Some of those pits have been dated over thousands of years ago. Where they would dig down through the gravels and into the bedrock. And light fires on that rock to break it up and free the nuggets for later use.
The copper is also found in places further away, where the ice that overran those original locations transported nuggets. And those nuggets then went to the waterways, and into Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, and so on. Those were the principal locations. And from them sprang all the copper industrial arts you find, at least in the northern half of the United States.
TOM WRIGHT: This is America's first metal mining boom. We're a young country, a growing country, on our way to becoming an industrial power, industrial super power actually. We need copper. Copper sheathing for our warships to keep barnacles and borers off wood-hall vessels.
Copper for brass and for bronze, so we can make cannons and arm those warships. 1861, so we can string a telegraph line from Washington to California, uniting East and West coast. Our country is growing. Telegraph lines, telephone lines, wiring in our cities.
SETH STEIN: The area around Lake Superior gives all kinds of recreational opportunities. But it's also full of great places to learn about the earth in a fun way. As you travel around the lake you'll see rift rocks in many places. When you're touring the area you're touring a huge outdoor geological laboratory.
Although geologists know a reasonable amount about the mid-continent rift there's a lot more to be learned. We don't know where the hot material came from, why it erupted here, or why the rifting process ended. One possibility is that the magma came from a hotspot, a volcanic region in the middle of a plate, like that now under Hawaii.
We also don't know how old the beautiful sedimentary rocks in Apostle Islands and Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore are, or whether they're related to the rift. There's lots of ongoing research. A major new data source will be a National Science Foundation program called, EarthScope, that deployed a network of seismometers in the area and across the rift.
These studies will show how the rift area differs at depth from its surroundings, and thus how the deeply buried rocks record the events that formed the rift. It will help scientists gain new insight into how and why the rift formed. So when you travel around Lake Superior, the beautiful scenery is showing you a billion-year story that's keeping geologist busy today. Enjoy it.
Carol and I have been coming to the Lake Superior area for more than 30 years to hike, kayak, and cross country ski, but never thought much about it as geologists. However, I recently helped start a huge National Science Foundation program in which hundreds of geologists are studying North America and how it evolved.
As part of that program, we and others are learning on a lot more about the Lake Superior Area, and how it results from a huge geologic structure.
CAROL STEIN: The mid-continent rift is an 1,800-mile-long scar, along which North America started to tear apart, but for some reason failed to form a new ocean. This huge geologic structure gave rise to the area's water-based history, produced the rich copper deposits that shaped its growth, and set the stage for today's tourist industry.
The mid-continent rift formed by plate tectonics, which is how the earth works, and why it differs from our neighboring planets. The earth's outer shell consists of continent and ocean-sized moving plates of cold, strong rock, about 60-miles thick, that move at speeds of a few inches a year. About the speed that our fingernails grow.
Because the plates move relative to each other their shapes change with time. Continents come together to form supercontinents, and then they break apart in a process called, rifting. During the rifting, the earth's crust stretches and starts to break along newly formed faults.
And a rift valley forms as blocks of crust move downward and the material below flows sideways. Rifting is like what happens if you pull a candy bar that has an outer chocolate shell and a nugget interior. The chocolate layer breaks, and the inside stretches, and bends downward.
Today, the East African Rift is splitting Africa into two plates, forming a long rift valley and causing volcanoes like Mount Kilimanjaro. That's how the mid-continent rift looked 1.1 billion years ago, except with a lot more volcanic rock. Of course there were no lions, giraffes, trees, or even grass, because they had not yet evolved.
Successful rifts break continents apart and form new deep oceans. However, for reasons that we really don't understand, some rifts fail when rifting stops before a new ocean basin forms. That's what happened here. The mid-continent rift is a long belt of volcanic and sedimentary rocks with two major arms meeting in the Lake Superior Area.
One arm extends south westward all the way to Oklahoma, and maybe a little farther south. The other southeastern arm extends through Michigan, and all the way through Alabama. Today most of the rift is buried under younger rocks and sediments. But around the Lake Superior Area there are lots of places, especially in the national and state parks, where we can see this majestic geological structure.
One of the best places to see the rift is along the St. Croix River on the Wisconsin-Minnesota border. Here the river has cut through a huge stack of lava flows from the rift. These are the rift's signature rocks. They're volcanic rocks, which we're not used to seeing in the Midwest.
They're flood basalts, volcanic rocks that poured out of the earth's surface. These lavas are 1.1 billion-year-old versions of the modern lava flows that we see in active volcanoes like in Hawaii. Over about a 20-million-year period they fill the Rift Valley with hundreds of lava flows.
The weight of the lava caused the valley to sink, and sediments fell into the valley carried by the rivers. When eruptions resumed more lava layers were laid down and the cycle went on and on.
WILLIAM ROSE: What we see is fairly big cobbles. They're rounded, they probably moved down as debris flows down the slope-- very, very steep slopes. So when the rift opened and made this giant crack on the earth, the whole sides of the rift, the upper parts of the continent above them, begin to cascade down and to fill the Rift Valley.
CAROL STEIN: Later on, other sedimentary rocks were deposited above the rift derived sediments, making some of the most beautiful colored cliffs around the lake.
GREGORY WAITE: So the basalt like these that are all around me here have a lot of iron and magnetite-- so magnetized minerals. That makes them very dense and highly magnetized, compared to the background rocks, regular rocks. So we can measure the differences in density of the rocks using an instrument like this.
This is called a gravimeter. It's like a very sophisticated bathroom scale. And it's capable of measuring very minute differences in Earth's gravitational pull. And those differences are due in part to the density differences in the rocks below.
So geologists and geophysicists have used these techniques to map out the extent of the rift beyond Lake Superior, all the way down through Wisconsin, Minnesota-- even down all the way to Oklahoma. And then, on the eastern arm of the rift, it goes down through Michigan, Ohio, and even as far as Alabama.
SETH STEIN: To see the rift underground, geologists use seismic waves, sound waves traveling through rocks, like the way doctors use ultrasound to see inside patients.
To survey the Lake Superior region, scientists used the sound source towed behind a boat to generate seismic waves. The waves traveled down, reflect off interfaces of depth between different rocks, and return to the surface where they're detected by seismometers. Based on the waves' travel time, computers generated an image of the rock layers.
A north-south cross-section shows a deep u-shaped basin under Lake Superior filled by layers in volcanic rocks, and overlying sediment, to a depth of 18 miles, which is much deeper than Lake Superior's average depth of about 500 feet. To understand how the rift evolved geologists have been looking at how all the different pieces are put together.
The most important clue we have is that here on the south shore of Lake Superior all the lava layers are dipping to the north under the lake. On the north side of the lake, for example at Isle Royale National Park, all the layers are dipping the other way, south, under the lake. This tells us that there's a huge depression and that Lake Superior runs right down the middle of it.
The sediments above volcanic rocks also dip toward the center of the lake, and both of these can be traced through very, very long distances.
Scientists still don't know exactly how the mid-continent rift formed, or why the rifting process ended before forming a new ocean. Here's our current idea of how this happened. The rift formed when the earth's crust pulled apart, forming major faults. As the extended crust thinned the mantle below it rose up. Volcanoes poured lava flows over the surface, which filled the growing depression.
After rifting stopped, and the faults became inactive, the basin continued to sink as the crust cooled, and lava kept pouring out over the surface. Once the volcanic activity ended, thick sediments filled the basin above the lava flows and the basin kept sinking under their weight. After the sinking stopped, beautiful flatlines sediment seen in places like the Apostle Islands were deposited.
Eventually the area was compressed by distant collisions uplifting the volcanic rocks, which is why we see them as the dramatic vistas at the surface today. The Lake Superior Area illustrates the idea of geoheritage. How geology influences in areas' growth and culture.
Although Lake Superior itself was sculpted by much more recent glaciers, most recently about 10,000 years ago, its location reflects the geometry of the ancient rift. Because the soft sediment filling the rift is much easier to erode than the harder basalt. This gave the region's first transportation system, which was used by Native Americans, and is still crucial today.
European settlers and traders used the lake to import and export trade goods. Lake fisheries were significant, first commercially, and now recreationally. And the lake remains an economic engine today. The port of Duluth Superior, by far the largest and busiest on the Great Lakes, handles an average of 38 million tons of cargo, and nearly 1,000 ship visits each year, connecting the heartland of the US and Canada to the rest of the world.
The lake also generates water related tourism, bringing millions of visitors each year. The rift also caused mineral deposits. Hot water rising through the rift volcanic rocks dissolved copper and deposited it in concentrations that became sources of valuable ore. These deposits were mined, first by Native Americans, and later by European settlers.
JAMES BROWN: One of the principal deposits in the east is located in Lake Superior, particularly Isle Royale, which is in the middle of Lake Superior, and the southern shore, particularly on the Keweenaw Peninsula, which is the thumb that sort of sticks up from the southern shore.
The best evidence for the use of copper comes from the pits. There were excavated by ancients. Some of those pits have been dated over thousands of years ago. Where they would dig down through the gravels and into the bedrock. And light fires on that rock to break it up and free the nuggets for later use.
The copper is also found in places further away, where the ice that overran those original locations transported nuggets. And those nuggets then went to the waterways, and into Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, and so on. Those were the principal locations. And from them sprang all the copper industrial arts you find, at least in the northern half of the United States.
TOM WRIGHT: This is America's first metal mining boom. We're a young country, a growing country, on our way to becoming an industrial power, industrial super power actually. We need copper. Copper sheathing for our warships to keep barnacles and borers off wood-hall vessels.
Copper for brass and for bronze, so we can make cannons and arm those warships. 1861, so we can string a telegraph line from Washington to California, uniting East and West coast. Our country is growing. Telegraph lines, telephone lines, wiring in our cities.
SETH STEIN: The area around Lake Superior gives all kinds of recreational opportunities. But it's also full of great places to learn about the earth in a fun way. As you travel around the lake you'll see rift rocks in many places. When you're touring the area you're touring a huge outdoor geological laboratory.
Although geologists know a reasonable amount about the mid-continent rift there's a lot more to be learned. We don't know where the hot material came from, why it erupted here, or why the rifting process ended. One possibility is that the magma came from a hotspot, a volcanic region in the middle of a plate, like that now under Hawaii.
We also don't know how old the beautiful sedimentary rocks in Apostle Islands and Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore are, or whether they're related to the rift. There's lots of ongoing research. A major new data source will be a National Science Foundation program called, EarthScope, that deployed a network of seismometers in the area and across the rift.
These studies will show how the rift area differs at depth from its surroundings, and thus how the deeply buried rocks record the events that formed the rift. It will help scientists gain new insight into how and why the rift formed. So when you travel around Lake Superior, the beautiful scenery is showing you a billion-year story that's keeping geologist busy today. Enjoy it.