Ghosts in the Stones

Lake Michigan reached record low-water levels in January, 2013, creating bountiful beaches on Wisconsin’s shoreline. By Winter, 2014, however, the Lake started rising. By April, 2020, it had risen more than six feet. It swallowed those sandy beaches, took down trees, erased landscaping, rearranged boulders.

At the same time, the Lake was giving up its stones. Millions and millions of Great Lakes rocks. Stones of all and textures, uniform in size and shape within their particular rock-neighborhood. Pieces of the region’s bedrock are plentiful; sedimentary rocks from the Ordovician, Silurian, and Devonian periods. Much of Wisconsin lay beneath the Laurentian ice sheet in the Wisconsin Glacial Episode, the most recent of the ice ages. The state is blanketed with glacial drift.

It’s Lake Michigan’s nature to turn stones into smooth ovals. But some of those rocks contain fossils. Or did contain fossils. Limestone, sandstone, quartz, and chert often contain irregularities, traces that can be identified as fossils. When I look at the weathered rocks, I see ghosts.

Elizabeth G Fagan @ Lake Michigan, lakemichigansleftcoast.com, Lake Michigans Left Coast — Elizabeth G Fagan @ Lake Michigan

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