Great Lakes Basin Research Paper

Ancient Life of the Great Lakes Basin: Precambrian to Pleistocene

2011
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Table of Contents I. Introduction 3 II. History of the Great Lakes Basin 3 III. Precambrian Period 3 IV. Ordovician Period 4 V. Silurian Period 4 VI. Devonian Period 4 VII. Pennsylvanian Period 4 VIII. Mississippian Period 4 IX. Lost Interval 5 X.

Ancient Life of the Great Lakes Basin: Precambrian to Pleistocene

The purpose of this report is to provide an overview of the ancient life of the Great Lakes Basin from the Precambrian era through the Ice Age. The Great Lakes region is a freshwater lake, which has a study of ancient life. The area has showed organisms that have lived about 3 billion years ago.
The individual area was also formed by the erosion and was filled by glacial melt water. Before the glacial erosion to the Ice Age, the Great Lakes were a plateau of ancient bedrock that had been eroding away for millions of years after an uplift of basin containing ancient seas. The Great Lakes Basin consists of ancient consolidated material. The bedrock is mainly covered in the Great Lakes Basin. The geological time scale and the geological map of the Great Lakes region can help understand the history of life in the Great Lakes region. The Great Lakes region has fossils located in different units of the geological time scale. The Precambrian Era depicts all of the time between the origin of the earth and the Cambrian period, when life first became abundant. Precambrian rocks haven’t been able to be depicted in the Great Lakes region because much of the original structure of the rocks has been changed by metamorphic processes and because billion of years erosion has removed a huge amount of materials. The Precambrian rocks almost enclosed the area around Lake Superior and extended over a large part of Lake Huron and Lake
In the Great Lakes region the Cambrian period represents: sandstones deposited by stream erosion of ancient Precambrian rocks, and then sandstones were deposited by the action of the ancient invading seas. By this time the seas began to invade the Great lakes region. This caused the sedimentary rocks, mainly the sandstones, deposited in the region by wave action and other processes of the inland seas. The Ordovician period was a long period. More Ordovician rocks occurred in the Great Lakes Basin than Cambrian rocks, and the fossils are much more abundant than too. The Silurian period was a shorter period than the Ordovician, but this period was much more important in the Great Lakes region. Some fossils are abundant during this time. The Devonian period was long, which is referred to as the “age of the fishes”, during this time fishes became abundant in the fossil record. Limestone, dolomites, shale were deposited during the Devonian period and fossils were abundant in many areas of the Great Lakes Basin. During the Mississippian period, shale, siltstones, and sandstones were the most common sedimentary rocks deposited in the Great Lakes Basin. The Pennsylvanian period,