The Natural History Of Lockport

Lockport is the city somewhat to the east of Niagara Falls, NY at the approximate center of Niagara County. The downtown of the city is at the edge of the Niagara Escarpment. There is a gorge carved into the escarpment just to the west of Lockport that used to puzzle me, but now I can explain it.

THE GAP IN THE ESCARPMENT AT LOCKPORT

There is a large gap in the Niagara Escarpment at Lockport. This gap is right in the middle of the city and the point where Transit Road crosses the canal is near the low point of the gap. From that point, there lies higher ground both to the east and to the west.

The origin of this gap is well-known. If we drive toward the southwest on State Road from Transit Road at the low point of the gap, we can see that the higher ground to the east is the former bank of a river and that we are driving upstream along the former river bed. If we turn right and head west along the Lockport Bypass, Route 93, we can see that the ground gets higher and we can see the west bank of the river.

If we drive north along Ohio Street from Route 93, we see the rise in the road level also representing the west bank of the former river not long after we pass Simonds Street. This former river bed is now the route of the canal, the New York State Barge Canal, formerly and famously known as the Erie Canal.

It was this now-defunct river that carved the gap in the escarpment at Lockport. In fact, it was this river that made the modern city of Lockport because when the canal was being built in the 1840s, it had to turn southward at some point and climb the escarpment in order to reach it's destination of Buffalo and Lake Erie. This old river bed was chosen as the best site for the locks which would raise the ships higher or lower. The city grew around these locks, hence the name of Lockport.

The river was also the origin of Eighteen Mile Creek, which flows down to Lake Ontario at Olcott. It is easy to see on Ridge Road near Purdy Road that the valley around the creek now is much larger than the present creek could ever carve.

This old river was actually one of the five original outlets of the former Lake Tonawanda to what is now Lake Ontario that I described in my introduction to the natural history of the Niagara Falls area: "Review Of The Natural History Of Niagara Falls" on this blog.

The deepest part of this former lake was around what is now the area of the falls, but it extended eastward toward Rochester. It seems to me that the low-lying area where the Alabama Swamps, to the southeast of Lockport, are now located is a relic of this former lake. To the east of Lockport, Royalton Ravine near Gasport was another outlet of this lake.

The route that is now the Niagara River eventually superseded these other outlets and they were left dry, as they remain today. The river was not very long, it was an extension of Lake Tonawanda, from nearby Hinman Road, it is easy to see how the ground quickly gets lower going southward, representing the northern shore of the former Lake Tonawanda.

This short river probably originated with sliding icebergs eroding the ground at the end of the last ice age and creating a route for the water. But the river through what is now Lockport carried a large volume of water and it eroded away this gap in the escarpment while it lasted.

THE SECOND ESCARPMENT GAP AT LOCKPORT

However, if we look carefully at the satellite imagery of Lockport on our map link, http://www.maps.google.com/ we see that this is not the only gap in the escarpment. About 2 kilometers to the west, there is another large gap in the escarpment about the size of the one described above and with the same V-shape. Seen from high up in the satellite imagery, the escarpment appears as a dark line running roughly east-west in this area. This is because the escarpment is usually a steep hill with trees growing on it, which appear darker than the fields to it's north and south.

This second gap in the escarpment is not easily seen from ground level, which is in sharp contrast to the first gap. I have determined that the second gap in the escarpment at Lockport must be the former outlet of a temporary river, just as the other gap is, but from the previous warm era prior to the last ice age. There is really no other way to explain it.

In my review of the natural history of Niagara Falls on my Niagara blog, I described what natural historians refer to as the "St. David's River". This is the river that was congruent to the present Niagara River in the warm era prior to the last ice age. This former river is named for the Ontario village of St. David's, west of Queenston, where it met the escarpment.

Today, we can see a wide dip in the ground level while driving on the QEW west of the Stanley Avenue exit north of Niagara Falls, adjacent to St. David's. The river ran from what is now the Whirlpool to this point. The reason the Niagara Whirlpool formed is that the falls, eroding their way southward, encountered the glacial fill of the former St. David's River Gorge, which was much looser and easier to erode through than the sorrounding layers of solid rock.

Ice ages involve moving mountains of ice one or two kilometers high, known as glaciers. These glaciers typically obliterate features of the landscape except mountains and permanent features of the underlying rock layers like the escarpment. A river will carve a gorge in the layers of rock over time but when the next ice age comes, it will be filled in with soil, loose rock and other debris by the moving glaciers.

When the ice age is over, it all begins anew. The escarpment itself is pretty sturdy, it is about 200 million years old and has been through more than twenty ice ages.

So, I got to thinking, if the Niagara River had a predecessor in the previous warm era before the last ice age concerning the route of water from the upper Great Lakes area to the Lake Ontario area, why couldn't this former river at Lockport also have such a predecessor? It did and this is how the second gap in the escarpment at Lockport came to be. Just as with the St. David's and Niagara Rivers, it formed somewhat to the west of the similar route that formed in the present warm era after the end of the last ice age.

If you are in the area and want to have a look at this largely hidden second escarpment gap at Lockport, begin in front of the Delphi factory at the intersection of Upper Mountain Road and Sunset Drive. Drive down Sunset Drive to the bottom of the escarpment and turn right (eastward) on Niagara Street. You will get steadily lower in elevation until you cross a bridge over a deep chasm and then will climb back up the escarpment. The chasm is the bottom of this gap.

Turn right on Michigan Street. You will pass two side streets, Oakhurst and South Niagara Streets. From the end of these streets, a view directly across this gap can be seen.

Turn right when you reach West Avenue. You will notice that the level of the ground is getting lower as you go westward. The wide dip in the ground level here reaches it's lowest point about where West Avenue intersects Otto Park Place. Now turn right on Old Upper Mountain Road, Route 93. The ground level will get higher until we reach our starting point.

Now on a map or the satellite imagery, we can see that the low point in the ground above the escarpment, where West Avenue intersects Otto Park Place, is exactly in line with the low point of the gap below the escarpment. How can there be a wide dip in the ground level both above and below the escarpment? This is clearly a large-scale phenomenon requiring some special explanation and I cannot find any reference to it.

My explanation of this is relatively simple. There was a temporary drainage river in this location in the warm period before the last ice age, which began about 20,000 years ago. This river was eventually superseded by the St. David's River at Niagara, which was the predecessor to the present Niagara River. But while it lasted, it eroded a sizable gorge into the escarpment, which must be at least 30,000 years old. This gorge is the one I have just described.

The same sequence of events would happen in the present warm period after the end of the last ice age, involving the temporary Lockport River described above and the Niagara River. It does not make sense for these two former river systems which carved these two gorges in Lockport to have operated at the same time because they are too close together and one would have superseded the other.

When the glaciers of the last ice age came, they pushed a vast amount of soil, rock and, other debris with them. This filled in most of both the St. David's River Gorge and this second gorge in Lockport. The tremendous weight of the glaciers compressed this loose fill, causing it to compact in volume. This is why there is a low point in the road on West Avenue opposite this gorge, it was filled in and tamped down by the glaciers of the last ice age. This can easily be compared with the former river from the present warm era that has not been filled in by glacial fill.

THE GOTHIC HILL COLLAPSE

Water flowing through this gorge from the predecessor of Lake Tonawanda in the warm period before the last ice age weakened the rock structure of the escarpment by erosion. In the area on the escarpment from Gothic Hill Road, to the west of Sunset Drive, around into the gorge, we can see in the satellite imagery that the escarpment is not a sharply-defined dark line of trees at all. In this section, it is more like a broad hill.

If we proceed past Sunset Drive along Upper Mountain Road until we reach Gothic Hill Road and turn right there, we will see, as we descend the escarpment that there is a wide area beyond the trees to our right (east) where a section of the escarpment has collapsed away. When we get to the bottom of the escarpment at Lower Mountain Road, which becomes Niagara Street going east, we find ourselves on a hill, known as Gothic Hill.

My explanation for this is also simple. The water flowing through this gorge from the former river that carved it probably weakened the structure of the rock in the escarpment. When the last ice age came, the weight of the glacier caused a section of the escarpment to collapse and the result that we see today is part of the escarpment missing and Gothic Hill as a pile of the resulting debris at the bottom of the escarpment.

THE HIGH STREET RIDGE

High Street in Lockport is built atop a ridge. This makes High Street the highest street in elevation in the city, hence it's name. The thing that makes the High Street Ridge different from most of the other glacial ridges that I have described is that it is a primary, rather than a secondary glacial ridge.

The soil and loose rock that was to form the High Street Ridge was hoisted up over the escarpment at the beginning of the last ice age, rather than at the end of it. Most of the glacial ridges that I have described in my writings on the natural history of the Niagara area have been secondary ridges that were formed my massive bergs breaking loose as the glacier melted and broke apart at the end of the ice age, and sliding along the slope of the underlying rock strata and plowing up the ground as they went along. When the berg melted enough so that it could not push the ground in front of it any further, it remained as a secondary glacial ridge.

But the High Street Ridge was formed maybe 20,000 years ago, at the onset of the ice age. After being hoisted over the escarpment, it was shaped and compacted by the tremendous weight of the glacier resting upon it. If you look at this ridge, you can see that it takes the shape of an aircraft wing, an airfoil, steeper looking northward from High Street than it is looking southward.

I was so impressed by how this ridge is formed that I decided to nickname it "The Crown Of Lockport".

I described above how the large gap in the escarpment in the middle of Lockport was the result of erosion by a former river draining the former Lake Tonawanda. So that today, the escarpment does not form a straight line at Lockport.

Yet, the High Street Ridge forms an impressively straight line. A ridge formed from debris that was hoisted over the escarpment should logically form a line approximately congruent to the edge of the escarpment. The reason for this apparent discrepancy is simply that the High Street Ridge was formed before the former river eroded away part of the escarpment. This shows that the escarpment here must have once formed a nearly straight line.

Here is a map link if you would like to have a look at the satellite imagery. High Street can easily be seen as can the gap in the escarpment which I am referring to. http://www.maps.google.com/ The escarpment appears in the satellite imagery as a dark line, due to the fact that there are trees on it but no fields.

This type of primary glacial ridge does not occur further west in Niagara County because the escarpment gets higher there. The reason that the High Street Ridge did not get pushed away by secondary glaciation at the end of the ice age is also fairly obvious. There is a pronounced southward slope to the underlying rock strata above the escarpment throughout Niagara County.

An easy way to see how the escarpment gets lower as we go eastward is the direction of Royalton Ravine near Gasport. Like the former river in Lockport, this was also a flow channel of the former Lake Tonawanda that formed at the end of the last ice age but began draining about 3500 years ago. The water that carved the ravine here flowed eastward as well as northward, so that the ravine today runs from southwest to northeast.

West of the High Street Ridge there is another ridge, in the industrial area just outside Lockport. The ridge is parallel to Hinman Road. However, I have decided that this ridge must be artificial. I can see in the satellite imagery that there is a quarry operation to the north of the ridge and it was probably out there to hide this from view. In the area of this ridge, there is a slope to the ground both to the east and south and so it be most illogical for the glacier to deposit a ridge there.

But east of the High Street Ridge is another such primary glacial ridge, the one upon which Chestnut Ridge Road is built. The reason that this ridge is longer than the High Street Ridge is simply that the escarpment gets lower as we go east and the glacier had an easier time hoisting the soil and debris over it to form a ridge.

If you would like to see something really interesting along the escarpment in Niagara County, notice the ridge along the base of the escarpment in Lewiston, along which Ridge Road is built, and far to the east of Lewiston. The escarpment is much higher here than it is at Lockport and eastward and this ridge is what would have been ridges like the High Street Ridge and Chestnut Ridge, if it had been further east where the escarpment is not as high. But there, the escarpment was too high and too steep for the glacier to lift the soil and debris over the escarpment and there is remains today, along the base of the escarpment.

There is a gap, in Lockport, between the High Street and Chestnut Ridges and the two ridges form nowhere near a straight line. I notice that some very interesting glacial activity has taken place in the gap between these two ridges.

THE LOCKPORT GLACIAL VALLEY

Going eastward on East Avenue in Lockport, we begin to drop into a wide dip in the ground level as we pass Priscilla Lane. The drop gets steeper at Davison Road and reaches bottom at Ambleside Drive. Ambleside Drive and Penrith Road seem to be at the edge of the escarpment but we can see beyond, looking northward, an elongated ridge upon which the golf course is built.

Continuing eastward, the ground level rises as we pass Rydelmount Road and we are back to approximately the level at which we began at Day Road. (East Avenue becomes Chestnut Ridge Road). If we turn northward on Cold Springs Road, we see that there is indeed a very significant ridge here. Let's name it, appropriately, the Cold Springs Ridge.

What we have here is a glacial valley. The escarpment gets low so we can logically presume that a lot of debris and soil gets pushed up here by the glacier at the beginning of an ice age. But at the end of the ice age, the reverse occurs. Massive bergs of ice broke free as the glacier began to melt, slid along this broad glacial valley, pushing the soil in front of it over the escarpment that today forms the Cold Springs Ridge on the golf course. Fascinating.

Why not just call this the Lockport Glacial Valley?

If we were to look southward, we can see how the Lockport Glacial Valley operated at the end of the last ice age about 12,000 years ago. If we go west on East High Street, we see that the road level gets lower, forming a broad dip, as we pass Magnolia Drive. The other side of this dip is around East Park Drive. At this point, we are not far from the eastern end of the High Street Ridge so you can see how this glacial valley occupied the gap between the two major glacial ridges in the area, the High Street and Chestnut Ridges.

On Day Road/Ernest Road, there is another long dip in the road level between Chestnut Ridge Road and East High Street. This was another route by which bergs of ice and meltwater flowed in toward the drop over the low area of the escarpment at the end of the last ice age. It is clear to see the waviness to the ground on the other golf course, between Davison and Day Roads. These waves in the ground are minor glacial ridges.

If we look east down Keswick Road, off Davison Road not far from the escarpment, you can see the valley here also through which the bergs and water flowed toward the escarpment. This low area in the escarpment is a permanent feature and not just a result of the last ice age. This process must have continued over a number of ice ages, with the Lockport Glacial Valley being eroded somewhat deeper each time.