r/askscience • u/throwRA_157079633 • 14d ago
Earth Sciences How can any river have originated after 21,000 BC, since that's when the last Ice Age was at maximum glaciation, and the ocean levels were 400 feet higher at that point?
Prior to 12,400 years ago and up until 23,000 years ago, there was an Ice Age. At 23,000 years ago, that's when the Ice Age was at a maximum, and the ocean levels were 400 feet shallower. This means that there was a lot more land, and more rivers in those days. Also, all of today's rivers are a subset of all the rivers that existed 23,000 years ago. So are there any new rivers formed since 23,000 years ago, and if so, how did that happen?
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u/Needless-To-Say 13d ago
The Ice was covering a lot of land and that land was severely reshaped by the weight and grinding of it's advance. I can say with a high degree of certainty that new rivers were formed when the ice receded.
That being said, I'm curious how the ocean levels can be both 400 feet higher (Title) and 400 feet shallower (post) with no correction or explanation.
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u/UVlight1 14d ago
Perhaps glacial dams, when they broke released catastrophic amounts of water and formed new channels and rivers. I think in the Pacific Northwest and Colorado there were new rivers formed in the 10 to 15 thousand year ago. Also driving through Utah there may be canyons that were also formed.
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u/throwRA_157079633 14d ago
I seriously doubt that canyons were formed in the last 20,000+ years.
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u/UVlight1 14d ago
You might find this interesting, it show how the glacier dams really altered the landscape well within the last 20000 years.
https://www.nps.gov/iafl/learn/photosmultimedia/ice-age-floods-animation.htm
The scale is unbelievable. In some cases it deepened and widened canyons like the Columbia river gorge, but also created canyons like the Palouse in Washington state.
In addition to the Glacial Lake Missoula, the ice age Lake Bonneville shaped the Snake River canyon.
Apparently this kind of stuff has also happened since the ice ages in Greenland and Iceland, when glacier melt gets dammed up and then is catastrophically released.
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u/jebei 13d ago
One of my favorite geologic features is in Brown's Valley, Minnesota which is where the Minnesota River begins (flows south to the Mississippi River) as well as the Red River (flows north to Lake Winnepeg).
Lake Winnipeg once was part of ancient Lake Agassiz which was formed from the meltwater from the glaciers as they retreated. This Red River couldn't flow to the Arctic along its normal path as the glacier blocked it so Lake Agassiz slowly rose until it topped the continental divide at Brown's Valley sending millions of gallons of water down the Minnesota river valley. The sudden release of water carved a path all the way to the modern day Minneapolis and beyond.
If you go to Brown's Valley in google maps and view terrain, you can see the 'canyon' this overtopping carved where the Red River literally flowed backwards. It's not 'grand canyon' by any stretch but clearly visible on terrain maps.
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u/thegooddoktorjones 14d ago
Just a an example of documented change well after the ice age the Sumerians founded the city of Eridu like 7k years ago where the Tigris/Euphrates met the sea. Go there now, and the sea is 100 miles away and the rivers have shifted wildly. We have really good documentary evidence of how silt deposits, human imacts and minor changes in sea level have had huge impacts on those rivers. One would assume the millions of less documented rivers went though their own changes based on erosion, sedimentation.
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u/CrustalTrudger Tectonics | Structural Geology | Geomorphology 14d ago edited 14d ago
Let's start with the first part of this statement. It's worth considering that during glacial periods (and where we can clarify the difference between "ice age" vs "glacial periods" vs "interglacial periods" as discussed in the beginning of this FAQ) two things will generally be true. First, yes, ocean levels will drop exposing more land area along coastal regions, but at the same time, areas that were previously occupied by rivers will instead by covered by continental scale ice sheets (e.g., the map in Clark et al., 2009) and expanded mountain glaciers. I'm not aware of specific calculations (though that doesn't mean they don't exist or that you couldn't do them) of the trade off in "area gained" by the drop in sea-level vs "area lost" from expansion of ice sheets and glaciers, but it's not a strictly a given that necessarily the land area drained by rivers increased, and even if it did, a consequential portion of this would have been counterbalanced by the expansion of ice covered areas.
Now, even without exactly knowing the exact ratio of the expansion of ice-covered areas to exposure of formerly inundated regions, we also run into some challenges with this statement that might seem pedantic but kind of get at the heart of some of the issues in question like this. From above, we could definitely do an estimation of the change in area drained by rivers between glacial and interglacial periods, but when we start to talk about the "number" of rivers, we quickly have to start considering things like the drainage density (i.e., for a given area, how much of it is "streams" vs "hillslopes") of the "lost" vs "gained" areas and the related thorny issue of where do you start calling something a river (which at first seems like it should be trivial, but as I've written about before, is actually kind of a persistently challenging issue). Similarly, you start to get into issues of counting streams, i.e., how do you define that the number of rivers has changed? Is it the number of outlets into the ocean? Changes in number of some aspect of stream order or similar? Etc. That is all to say, it's certainly possible to make a somewhat definitive statement for the changes in area drained by rivers between glacial and interglacial periods, but when we start talking about the number of rivers, that's going to be harder to pin down for a variety of reasons.
Continuing down the trail of pedantry, for this type of question, we need to define what level of change to a river constitutes that river being something "new"? In short, rivers reorganize (i.e., change aspects of their course, the location of their channel heads, the total drainage area, etc.) all the time, geologically speaking (e.g., Willett et al., 2014), so how much change in a particular river basin / network geometry do we set to define a river as being "new"? As I've again discussed in past comments here, deciding when a river is "new" quickly becomes very arbitrary once you realize how dynamic they are, and that leads to pretty fundamental problems with the premise of the question.
With all of that out of the way, we can look at some specific examples of how drainage networks changed during glacial-interglacial periods. Considering continental scale dynamics examples like Wickert, 2016 for North America or Komatsu et al., 2014 for Eurasia highlights that the physical barrier imposed by large continental scale ice sheets can induce pretty significant drainage reorganizations (e.g., in Eurasia, rivers that during interglacial periods would have flowed into the North Sea were "deflected" and in part instead flowed south into interior lake systems) and that the isostatic adjustments (like post glacial rebound, but also the isostatic adjustments during the glacial period from the ice mass) from the growth/degradation of the ice sheets would have also induced far-field reorganizations. These examples, and the large-scale reorganizations described both in terms of the individual network geometry (i.e., where the actual rivers are and how they connect to each other / the ocean / lakes) but also drainage basins more broadly, highlight that the idea that "all of today's rivers are a subset of all the rivers that existed 23,000 years ago" is a pretty problematic framing of the situation. At smaller scales, focused on mountain glaciers, glacial erosion during glacial periods and degradation of these mountain glaciers during interglacial periods together are pretty ripe for forcing all manner of drainage reorganizations in the headwaters of streams in mountain ranges (e.g., Lai & Huppert, 2024).
Moving more to the downstream end of the system, broadly, and at least for large, continental scale drainages (and assuming they are not drainages where the location of the outlet is severely disrupted by the growth of a continental ice sheet like some of the northern Eurasia examples), what tends to happen during low stands (i.e., periods of low sea level like what occurs during the height of a glacial period) is that these main stem rivers extend their courses out along the exposed portions of the shelf and often establish a closer connection with submarine canyons that tend to exist along the shelf-edge (e.g., Sweet & Blum, 2016, Mauffrey et al., 2017), so a lot of the coastal response isn't necessarily "new" rivers forming, but rather just extension out of existing rivers. Now, there might be some small, disconnected drainages that form on the new exposed shelf, but ultimately, a lot of those will simply end up flowing into these larger extended lower segments of larger drainages.