250 H. L. Fair child — Glacial Lakes in Central New York. 



During the later phase of the Laurentian glacial waters, 

 Lake Warren invaded central New York from the west, and 

 drew down to its level the local waters of the Finger Lakes 

 valleys. This region is of special interest, on account of its 

 singular topographic character, and because it includes the 

 critical locality where the great Warren waters found lower 

 escape to the sea (than by the westward outlet to the Mississippi) 

 and excavated in their flow toward the Mohawk a series of 

 remarkable channels, piling the debris in great deltas in the 

 more quiet waters of the intersected valleys. 



The abandoned rock channels and correlating deltas are the 

 most conspicuous features produced by the glacial waters. 

 Southeast of Syracuse these great cuts in rock, some of them 

 headed by cataracts, lie so close together that they cannot be 

 represented satisfactorily upon the map (Plate Yl). They 

 are the last records of a lake history of truly dramatic interest. 

 Their examination will repay not only the special student in 

 geology and physiography, but the person having merely a 

 general or casual interest in those sciences. 



The study of the glacial lake phenomena in New York State 

 has now been carried so far that the principal facts and rela- 

 tions in the history of those waters are known. It is the 

 purpose of this writing to describe briefly the succession of 

 events in the life and extinction of the later and broader glacial 

 waters in the critical district of the Finger Lakes. 



Description of the Maps, p. 251 and Plate YI. 



The larger map locates in a generalized way the shorelines of 

 the four greater glacial lakes, Newberry, Warren, Dana, and 

 Iroquois. 



The outlet of Lake Newberry was south to the Chemung 

 River through the col (900 feet altitude) at the head of the 

 Seneca Yalley. The probable eastward limit of this water is 

 indicated between Cayuga and Owasco Yalley s, and the locality 

 of its destructive drainage or lowering into Lake Warren is 

 shown east of the north end of Canandaigua Lake. 



The Warren waters found their first eastward escape south- 

 east of Syracuse by either the channel west of Butternut 

 Yalley, with altitude 840 feet, or the one east of that valley 

 with elevation 890 feet. (The channels are better shown on 

 the smaller map.) The uncertainty as to the earliest spillway 

 is indicated by the broken termination of the eastern end of 

 the Warren shoreline. The most westerly of the hypo- Warren 

 outlets is the one north of Skaneateles with elevation 812 feet. 

 East of this channel is a series of channels which conveyed the 

 overflow eastward to lower and lower levels. 



