Discovers Ancient Falls

After pursuing an interest in geology that began while he was a student at Dartmouth, Richard J. Lougee '27, now a professor at the Graduate School of Geography, Clark University, made scientific news recently by discovering the site of an ancient waterfall which rivaled Niagara Falls in height. It was no accident, for Dr. Lougee had been hunting for it for 19 years. Discovery of the waterfall, which lasted for at least 4,000 years, was made this past summer at East Haddam, Conn., in the gorge of the Connecticut River. It was the result of Dr. Lougee's attempts to find the outlet of the great glacial lake which occupied the Connecticut Valley approximately 20,000 years ago as the last ice sheet melted away from New England. At present, however, only about one half of the height of the falls is above sea level, the lower half having been submerged as the sea has risen in post-Glacial time.

Dr. Lougee's studies of the glacial lake, which he named Lake Hitchcock in honor of Amherst College's early scientist-president, were begun in the Hanover, N. H., region. In 1928, while doing routine office work on the varved clay graphs he had collected in Hanover, he found evidence that the lake had subsided abruptly in one section and that heavy erosion followed the drainage which is now the Connecticut River. Since there was no deposit at the present mouth of the river, sea level then must have been far below the sea level of today. It was this rapid drainage that caused Dr. Lougee to commence his search for the lake outlet 19 years ago, while an assistant to the late J. Walter Goldthwait, Professor of Geology at Dartmouth.

RICHARD J. LOUGEE '27