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#glacial outwash
oflgtfol · 2 years
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i think an undeniable factor in my fascination with caves is the fact that long island does not have a single natural cave. the idea that people can just take a walk through a forest and find some crack in the ground that leads to this giant cave system is just like inherently offputting and unnerving to me
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uwlmvac · 1 year
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This might look like just a big rock, but it's actually a metate, or grinding stone. The waterworn, basalt-like rock could have come from glacial outwash. How can we tell it's a metate? The surface is broad, flat, and smoothed from being rubbed with a handheld stone (mano). The drawing shows a well-worn metate and mano, which would have been used for grinding corn or other materials. The metate in the photo is about 400-700 years old and was found at a precontact Oneota site in Onalaska, Wisconsin. The site had been stripped by heavy equipment that left light-colored, nearly parallel scrapes across the stone's surface. The darker, broken places at both ends represent much older damage. For more information on these important tools, watch MVAC's "Mano and Metate" video at https://www.uwlax.edu/mvac/past-cultures/artifacts/?letter=m&term=164812.
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glitchlight · 11 months
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DIRT
so, what makes a dry gravel prairie so special? I tried to look it up, but it flew over my head.
does it have a weird soil or a cool ecosystem or some sort of gravel based lifeform?
I will admit I'd not quite heard of these before; most of my work professionally has been in the Indiana/Ohio/Kentucky region, and as an environmental consultant i don't get to read as much surficial geology maps as I'd like. With that said, having done some review, the Illinois DNR helped.
So basically the reason gravel prairies exist is due to the depositional environments created by the glacial retreat from the last glacial maximum (in what is referred to as the Wisconsin Glaciation), which was an approximately 10,000 year period approximately from 21 to 11 thousand years ago. Colloquially, people who never set foot in a geology course might not understand the scale of what a glaciation period looks like; we are talking about ice as tall as mountains covering the majority of continents. In Manhattan, approximately a mile of ice sat over the island.
So naturally glaciers are essentially bulldozers that obliterate topography and surface geology, and absorb it into the ice sheet as they advance. Then, when they retreat, sediments are sorted by water and wind based on how large they are.
Mineral sediments are generally divided by particle size into five categories: clays, silts, sands, gravels, and boulders. Clays are super fine and easily wash away with the meltwater. Silts are small enough that they can get picked up by dust storms and modest floods. Sands and gravels and boulders aren't though.
So what ends up happening with them is that they are often poorly sorted by the glacial meltwater, which include both glacial floods from ice dammed lakes melting in violent events, and thousands of streams that fed into local rivers. Essentially every river in the midwest has enormous beds of glacial sand and gravel from thousands of years of meltwater carrying deposits until the glaciers receded farther north than their watershed.
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(here's a portion of the surficial geologic quadrangle for the Cincinnati area; the area in yellow, which encompasses much of the downtown metro area, is a 100-150' thick layer of glacial outwash.)
The other main way glaciers drop sediment high in proportions of sands, gravels, and boulders in mounds called kames, or other types of glacial fluvial features, such as eskers, which are relict features of water sorting that happened within or on top of the glaciers; after all, glaciers were three-dimensional structures melting in complex patterns. The kames and eskers seen on the land surface now, they're essentially upside down rivers and ponds that fell out! Very weird stuff!
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Anyways, ecology loves a weird niche, and soils high in sands and gravels are going to have different properties from the surrounding soils, namely tending to be dryer and less fertile. Accordingly, the species that would develop in these areas would be different from the surrounding areas, and adapt to those different conditions. One can imagine pre-development species traveling along the small eskers or river gravel beds, but the limited spatial extent of the gravel deposits means that these endemic species (meaning they live nowhere else) are more prone than other populations to habitat fragmentation and loss, which is why preservation of the remaining gravel prairies are important and!!
Check out this preservation battle that is actively ongoing in Illinois regarding dry gravel praries just so a fuckin airport can expand a stupid road.
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bluebrightly · 22 days
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FURTHER AFIELD: A Long Day in Iceland - part 2
Part I of “A Long Day in Iceland” left off just as we arrived at Jökulsárlón, the South Coast’s popular Glacier Lagoon. There, amidst rugged mountains and glacial outwash plains, a long glacial tongue descends from Iceland’s largest ice cap to a lagoon. When chunks of ice break off the glacier they slowly float across the lagoon and down a channel to the North Atlantic Ocean. Icebergs can linger…
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jwood719 · 5 months
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A morning visit to Shades State Park.
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There have been many a day, in the middle of the work week, when my comment was "Be a good day to visit a state park," but the weekend wasn't so amenable. Then came a Saturday that was forecast to be decent (if chilly in the morning), so I headed down.
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The lower angle of the mid-Autumn light leaves the defiles in shadow much of the day, and the air remains much cooler under the multi-colored canopy.
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As usually happens in Shades or near-by Turkey Run State Park, I find myself shooting vertically, to capture an impression of the height of the wood or the rock faces.
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Looking down on Sugar Creek from Prospect Point (above) and Canoe Island. A viewing platform has been cantilevered over the rim of the valley to afford the scene beyond the trees. Though not designated as a wilderness preserve, the casual visitor is not allowed on the north side of the creek (below, rising in the distance):
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I believe the usual story is that the ravines were carved over thousands of years by the flow of water from the higher prairies. I've wondered, though, if the ravines at Shades and also at Turkey Run (among other places), were initially scored through the landscape by glacial outwash, but that's me.
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In addition to the "big picture" images, I also like to capture some of the smaller details, as with these two.
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Park management is as might be expected: pack out your trash; take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints; deadfall is left to decay. Where a tree has fallen across a trail (and they do), the trunk may be cut away to allow for foot traffic, leaving the rest of the tree to lay where it dropped; in some places, a walker must clamber over, or (below, in the background) go underneath:
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underneath as the trail really is the stream bed. In places, the bottom of the ravine is wide enough to allow options other than the stream itself, but often the only place wide enough is right where the water runs.
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And as usual, I found myself amused that other visitors seemed to have no idea what to expect from the trail conditions.
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At the creek's edge: on a rocky shingle of Sugar Creek where the ambient air temperature was a good 10 degrees warmer.
Photos: R. Jake Wood, 2023
Shades State Park
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essayly · 1 year
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Geology lab assignment
part 1 with the experiments will not be graded and does not need to be completed. In part 2 you will be creating a profile. Follow the instructions for 13.2 and refer to the Glacier Lab Handout document Part 3: Follow handout instructions and let me know if you need assistance with math or glacial landform features! Part 4: Refer to glacial landform features like moraines, drumlins, outwash…
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joembpro · 1 year
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We all know who built his house upon the sand. The proverb was made millenia ago yet it still takes place today. There is no bedrock under this glacial outwash peninsula for hundreds of feet, thus no way to secure a structure on the shifting sands. #architecture #architecturephotography #builtenvironment #modernlandscapes #socialcomentary #closedintent #landscapephotography #photographyofplace #capecodphotographer #capecodphotography #capecod #capecodinsta #capecodinstagram #capelife #capecodtoday https://www.instagram.com/p/Cj3BRZTOnkC/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
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incrediblekerlon · 1 year
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Ruby animal wandering willows
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It can be easily identified by its straight spike of white-pink flowers and kidney-shaped leaves covered in a waxy layer-no other plant in the park has this combination of characteristics. Grizzly bears love to frequent these shrub-covered landscapes for bearflowers, also known as Richardson’s brookfoam ( Boykinia richardsonii). Leatherleaf is commonly found here, and the white-crowned sparrow can be seen foraging for insects and seeds on the ground and from branches of the shrubs. Settled between the alpine zone and boreal forests, shrubs are around 20 to 150 cm tall. This indicates that soils also have more moisture in this landcover type. Tussocks are areas of raised solid ground in bogs that are held together by root systems, and are common here. The last type of low shrub landcover is mixed with sedges. Upland sandpipers and moose will also make appearances as they scavenge for berries and food. Dwarf birch is the most common plant here, along with crowberries and labrador tea, which are pictured in the quilt. Blueberry patches can be scattered among the shrubs.Īnother low shrub landcover is mixed with ericaceous willow and sits below the alpine zone and above the boreal forest, most commonly on slopes of foothills and broad valleys. This landscape is almost completely covered in shrubs, most of which American dwarf birch. They are also known for having different song “dialects” based on where they are from. Though it spends its summer in northern habitats such as Alaska, these sparrows migrate south for the winter. The white-crowned sparrow is well-known for whistling and buzzing through the low vegetation. Grasses and sedges such as cow parsnip and bluejoint grass can also be found here. This landcover type is most frequently found around mid-elevation alluvial stream deposits and near small streams, making dispersal of seeds easy. Willows are insect- (often bumblebee-) pollinated and produce a large amount of seeds which are dispersed by wind and water. Six species of willows dominate the overstory of willow landscapes, including the Alaska willow. Green false hellebore and devil’s club are two other plants that can be found in the understory here. This allows alders to grow in less fertile habitats because they are able to take up more nutrients from the soil. The alder plant forms a team with bacteria in the soil-called a symbiotic relationship-in order to take nitrogen from the ground instead of the air. In fact, over ¾ of the plants found in this landcover type are alder species! This genus ( Alnus spp.) is special because it has the ability to fixate nitrogen. Steep rocky slopes made up of glacial sediment can be found throughout the park, creating prime habitat for various species of alder shrubs. Lady slipper orchids and dwarf dogwoods can be found scattered throughout the understory. Black spruce trees Found at lower elevations north of the Alaska Range, soils are cold and poorly drained with abundant permafrost. It was also historically used to treat ailments such as asthma, diarrhea, pneumonia, sore throats, and headaches, depending on the region of the country. Bog Labrador tea leaves were even used by Native Americans across the country. Plants like bog blueberry and labrador tea dominate this landscape, filling the air with fragrances. Alluvial fans-or cone-shaped deposits of gravel-and outwash-floodplains created by rivers offer excellent conditions for this landcover type.Ī stroll through the stunted spruce forest is certainly a feast for the nose. Red-backed voles and lynx can also be found wandering through the black spruce, labrador tea, and alders. Flashes of red feathers through the air offer clues of ruby-crowned kinglets and white winged crossbills, collecting insects and conifer seeds, respectively, in this more open forest. Frequently fires sweep across this landscape, but fire can help release seeds from black spruces’ semi-serotinous cones. In contrast to the dense spruce, trees in open spruce forests usually only grow around 7.5 meters tall. In the spring, male black-capped chickadees bring food back to the female and young and on the south side of the Alaska Range black bears roam the forests with their cubs. White and black spruce dig plant their roots into the sandy soil and dominate the densely-forested landscape, where the trees can be over 20 meters tall! Tamaracks and shrubs such as alders and willows grow wherever sunlight comes through.
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ultraheydudemestuff · 2 years
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Wolf Plains Mound Group
15 Mound Street
The Plains OH 45780
Wolf Plains is a Late Adena culture group of 30 earthworks including 22 conical mounds and nine circular enclosures, located at the intersection of Mound Street and Gary Street a few miles to the northwest of Athens in Athens Township, Athens County, in the vicinity of The Plains, Ohio, originally known as Wolf's Plains, in a relatively flat terrace in an area of hilly terrain in southeastern Ohio's Hocking River valley. The terrace was formed by glacial outwash coming down the Hocking River, which became dammed at The Plains and found a new outlet to the northeast, leaving the terrace in place.
The Adena Culture was a Pre-Columbian Native American Culture that existed from 1000 B.C. to 100 A.D. in a time known as the Early Woodland Period. The Adena People existed throughout present day Ohio and its neighboring states. The Adena People were Athens County's first known residents. Their Culture can be traced between 88 B.C. and 100 A.D. Adena populations were scattered along the Hocking River and were constructing mounds like this one. Thousands of generations of Native Americans lived in the Hocking Valley. The Plains was the 2nd largest center of Adena activity in Ohio, and The Plains has the 3rd largest concentration of Adena burial mounds, and circular enclosures in the Eastern United States. The burial mounds contain remains, and there are theories that the circular enclosures could have ranged from sports arenas to clan initiation sites, or they could have held religious significance.
When settlers arrived on The Plains in the 1800s, they found 30 earthworks (conical mounds and circular enclosures), but only six mounds are still in existence today. The Wolf Plains Group was featured in Ephraim George Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis's landmark publication Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848). Their finished drawing was based on a sketch from 1836 by S. P. Hildreth, and contains some inaccuracies. Some of the clusters of mounds are rotated relative to their actual position, some are missing, and some are misplaced.
The Wolf Plains Group was added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 31, 1974; at that time, 25 earthworks remained in good enough condition to qualify as contributing properties. In 2008 The Archaeological Conservancy purchased the site of one of the remaining earthworks, the Dorr 2 Mound, using emergency POINT funds; and it plans to purchase more as funds become available. The majority of the remaining earthworks in the complex are privately owned and are threatened with destruction as The Plains community expands. These mounds are significant and an important part of the area’s history.
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indefenseofplants · 6 years
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Exploring a Sand Prairie
In this exciting episode, In Defense of Plants explores the fascinating botanical communities growing in a sand prairie in central Illinois. The unique soil conditions makes this place a hotbed for rare plants. Many of these species are disjuncts from further west. The story of this place began some 14,000 years ago as glacial outwash from the long gone Lake Chicago blew across the landscape and piled into great sand dunes. Join us for a fascinatingly beautiful botanical adventure. 
CORRECTION: The cactus is not Optuntia fragilis, it is actually the eastern prickly pear (Opuntia humifusa)... Woops!
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cedar-glade · 3 years
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Sullivantia sullivantii 
Sullivant's Coolwort
We see this plant only in dolostone glacial outwash cut gorge along refugial lines away from browse lines. It is considered to be  a product of symptomatic relictualism only preserved due to cold microclimates.in these locations. This species is a a true calcicole,( also known as calciphyte or calciphile) that requires high ph mineral soil as well. They are more overall chasmophytes, growing in cracks and choss pockets in mineral dust, vs direct rock aka lithophytic sensu-lato. They are very close to being true saxafrage and were even put into the genera Saxafraga at one point with many others like Micranthes ect. before a split. Either way, a true classic of dolostone gorge habitat and one that is very unique. 
Highland Co. Gorge, Ohio. 
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facts-details · 3 years
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Is it true that Maryland does not have any natural lakes?
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Q1: Is it genuine that Maryland doesn't have any regular lakes?
A1: Yes, there are no normal lakes in Maryland. The entirety of Maryland's lakes are artificial by damming streams. Some have been named lakes (e.g., Lake Habeeb in Allegany County and Deep Creek Lake in Garrett County), yet most have been named supplies (e.g., Loch Raven Reservoir in Baltimore County).
Q2: Did Maryland at any point have any regular lakes before?
A2: Yes. We are aware of something like one, and there could be more. The one unmistakably recorded case is Buckel's Bog, which was a 160-section of land, shallow periglacial lake (really a meadow) that involved the headwater district of the North Branch of the Casselman River in Garrett County during the late Pleistocene (19,000-14,000 years prior). [Reference: Maxwell, J.A. what's more, Davis, M. B., 1972, Pollen proof of Pleistocene and Holocene vegetation of the Allegheny Plateau, Maryland: Quaternary Research, 2(4): 506-530.]
Q3: Why are there no regular lakes in Maryland?
A3: There are around twelve significant sorts of lakes, which means there are around twelve different ways lakes structure. None of those is found in Maryland. Some 74% of all lakes are icy in beginning, however glacial masses never entered Maryland during the last Great Ice Age. Frigid lakes may frame in bedrock melancholies gouged out by ice sheets or in regions where separated squares of stale or withdrawing ice sheets are encircled by other frosty stores, for example, sand and rock outwash. At the point when the squares of ice liquefy away, the leftover melancholy, known as a pot, may load up with water to shape a "pot lake." Other significant kinds of normal lakes incorporate those that come about because of blaming, volcanic action, and avalanches obstructing a stream.
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trans-mando · 3 years
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glaciers lab: *occurs before we cover glaciers in class*
me: *is the resident non-geology major in my lab session*
TA: you got this relative dating order wrong. the glacial outwash obviously had to have formed before this moraine, it was formed by a burst flood from up here. and these potholes also had to be before any of those things.
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Vatnajökull, Iceland The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over the Vatnajökull ice cap, in southeast Iceland, in this summery image captured on 6 July 2019. Covering an area of around 8400 sq km, which is three times the size of Luxembourg, Vatnajökull is not only classified as the biggest glacier in Iceland, but the biggest in Europe. With an average ice thickness of around 900 m, the ice cap has about 30 outlet glaciers – many of which are retreating owing to warming temperatures. The most prominent outlet glaciers of Vatnajökull include Dyngjujökull in the north, Breiðamerkurjökull, and Skeiðarárjökull to the south. Vatnajökull conceals some of the most active volcanoes in the country, of which Bárðarbunga is the largest and Grímsvötn the most active. Periodic eruptions of these volcanoes melt the surrounding ice and create large pockets of water, which can often burst the weakened ice causing glacial floods, or ‘jökulhlaup’ in Icelandic. During these jökulhlaups, the glacier’s meltwater carries sediments and sands composed of ash to the coast. These outwash plains are called ‘sandurs’ and are commonly found in Iceland. Skeiðarársandur, the large area of black sand, visible south of the Skeiðarárjökull outlet glacier, covers an area of around 1300 sq km and was formed as the glacial rivers in the area washed ash and ice towards the sea. In the bottom-right of the image, on the southern side of Vatnajökull, the Jökulsárlón glacial lake, dotted with icebergs, is visible. Jökulsárlón began to form when the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier began retreating from the Atlantic Ocean owing to rising temperatures. The lake has grown considerably over time because of the melting of the glacier. It now covers an area of around 18 sq km, and with a maximum depth of around 250 m, it is considered Iceland’s deepest lake. The lake connects with the ocean and is, therefore, composed of both seawater and freshwater – causing its unique colour. Copernicus Sentinel-2 is a two-satellite mission. Each satellite carries a high-resolution camera that images Earth’s surface in 13 spectral bands. Together they cover all Earth’s land surfaces, large islands, inland and coastal waters every five days at the equator. contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2019), processed by ESA
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uwlmvac · 4 years
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This mano, or handheld grinding stone, is made of a whitish granite that probably came from glacial outwash deposited along the Mississippi and Black Rivers. It has one distinctly flat surface with minor pitting in the center from slight hammering. The other side is less heavily ground and has more extensive pitting. Manos are common at late precontact Oneota sites in the La Crosse area, especially at intensive agricultural settlements such those in the Sand Lake Archaeological District north of La Crosse. This example was found during 2008 excavations at Sand Lake.
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Long live the extinct mastodon!
By: Glenn Storrs, Withrow Farny Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology
Among the many mastodon fossils in Cincinnati Museum Center’s collection, by far the best example is the Overmyer Mastodon (named for the generous farmer on whose land it was discovered), from an agricultural drainage ditch excavation near Rochester, Indiana. Collected in 1978 by staff, students and alumni of Earlham College, the skeleton was acquired by CMC in the late 1980s. Since that time, it has been the subject of several research projects, but has had little other public exposure. That is about to change as we prepare to install the restored skeleton in our newly refreshed Ice Age exhibit. In a sense, we will be bringing this mastodon back from the dead.
The skeleton is beautifully preserved and about 70% complete. Essentially the entire vertebral column, ribs, hips, a shoulder blade and most of two of the legs are present. The skull and mandible are particularly fine, although neither tusk was found, so these latter will be represented in the skeletal mount by replicas, just as two of the limbs will be. At least some of the missing portions may have been scattered or destroyed by the ditch excavating machinery prior to discovery. The bones were buried at the bottom of what was originally a glacial outwash pond and have been dated to about 12,500 years ago. Pollen from the site suggests an open woodland spruce-dominated forest environment. The skeleton was not fully mature at the time of death, because unfused sutures or growth plates are clearly visible on some of the bones. However, it was a young adult and evidence from its anatomy, especially the shape of the skull and the size and orientation of the tusk sockets relative to the grinding tooth row, indicate that the animal was female (at about 7.5 feet high at the shoulder, a relatively large female). Of special interest is a rib that shows evidence of a swollen and partially healed break, indicating an earlier injury. How and why the animal ultimately died is unknown.
In order to reconstruct the skeleton for exhibit, it’s necessary to fully clean and conserve the bones, restore those that are damaged and replicate and replace the missing elements. All of these are then fitted to a custom-built steel armature, carefully crafted to hold each bone in its proper place, while allowing for them to be individually removed as needed for future study. Much of this work is typically done by an outside contracting firm that specializes in the creation of exhibit mounts for museums. We are working with Research Casting International (RCI), a renowned exhibit firm based in Toronto, Canada that has done such work for major museums around the world. RCI came to Cincinnati last fall, packed the mastodon bones in purpose-built crates and, with the proper export paperwork, trucked them to their workshop. The bulk of the armature has now been fabricated in Toronto and the skeleton is starting to take shape again for the first time in over 12,000 years. Their team will fully articulate the skeleton in Toronto, disassemble it once again and transport it back to CMC for permanent installation in its Union Terminal home.
We hope that the new exhibit will be ready for a public unveiling in late fall. If you have the chance, come say hi to the resurrected Overmyer Mastodon this autumn, an animal soon to make its return among the “living!”
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