? What is a ketlle and potwhole lake.

this maybe funny to some but I have never herd of this kinda of a lake.

this maybe funny to some but I have never herd of this kinda of a lake.

There is a (Pothole Lake) In Wash. and also in Calif, to name two and i think the term refers to a lake formed by washing such as in pothole in a road. However, im sure there is a better answer to be had shortly.

Kettle ponds are formed by glacial activities. Usually a large chunk of ice will fall off of a retreating glacier and slowly gouge a deep hole with a steep slope in the ground before it melts. This hole often is filled by groundwater, and the result is a kettle or pothole pond. They're common in New England in my experience, and I'd expect them to be common in other areas that were on the edge of the last great ice sheet such as Ohio or Indiana.

Not to put too fine a point on it... Actually the chunk falls off, and the sediment fills in around it (aggradation). Eventually, sometimes 1,000's of year later, the ice melts and leaves the lake.

Here's an aerial from Google Earth of the Interlobate moraines and kettles just north of Ann Arbor Michigan, one of the most distinctive streaks of kettles in North America...

 interlobate.jpg   181.49KB   11 downloads

These lakes are the result of the Huron and Erie lobes of the glacier that came down SW from the NE. In between them (this stretches all the way into Indiana, btw) ice calved off the sides of the ice, and were consequently buried by additional sediment coming from the meltwater as the glacier moved or retreated.

As you might have guess, this was on a scale that is almost beyond imagination. I love standing on the edge of one with students and saying "That... that was a chunk of ice". Or looking at a kame, which forms in a crevasse that gets filled in with sediment from melt, splitting a couple of these lakes, where the crevasse came first, filled in, and then the ice on both sides calved off, got covered by the ice in the crevasse and other sediment coming out of the melting face. That's a big wowwie.

So there's some places in southwestern, central and eastern Ohio where this is as well, just on a slightly smaller scale that what we see here in Michigan and northern Indiana.

There are also places where the ice melted out that are not kettles, because the supply of sediment exceeded the size of the ice. In areas like that, you'll find places like Cedar Bog that have really good year long groundwater outflow, and have microclimatic affects allowing boreal plants to live far further south than the rest of their distribution.

Todd

I'm right in a hot bed of glacial activity. Kettle hole ponds make up the majority of the ponds around my house.
Famous Walden Pond of HD Thoreau fame is a large and scenic kettle pond near here. Here in New England the deep, barren kettle ponds are light on native fish species. Usually plenty of introduced, especially trout.

WoW !!!! Super good info, I really need someone to ask one of these questions daily

Not to put too fine a point on it... Actually the chunk falls off, and the sediment fills in around it (aggradation). Eventually, sometimes 1,000's of year later, the ice melts and leaves the lake.

OK, aggradation it is. My detail focus today was on the evolution of the mammalian hard palate, so some other details had to give way...

Now on to the next curiosity:
How did a species such as Iowa Darters become stranded in these lakes and how did their range become so huge? 10,000 years after being stranded I find it amazing that they have not been accidentally killed through a natural process, or poisoned at some point through agriculture practices. One of the kettle ponds we visited last weekend was very small, (maybe a couple of acres) but it had an abundant population of both Least Darters and Iowa Darters. this population has been isolated and stable for over 10,000 years. Wow. I also wonder how much genetic diversity these stranded populations have between the various isolated lakes. It occurs to me that there would be some degree of divergent evolutionary pressures involved here.
-Thom

In 10,000 years, there may not be any evolutionary divergence if the populations are in stable environments even with apparent isolation. In the same time the Cyprinodon pupfishes have measurably diversified in the Death Valley system, but the system has a variety of microenvironments subject to both regular and irregular environmental changes.

Then again, I could be wrong and there are measurable differences in DNA features like tandem repeats.

This is really interesting to me, I know the glaciers came into Indiana at least as far as North of I70, but does anyone know of a particular lake in my area that was formed this way, or how i can find that out?? I would Love to see it and also sample some of the fish etc. In that lake, and figure out how they got there. Any info would be much appreciated, Thanks in advance

Jim, if you look at the maps Todd posted, you'll see they often look round and grouped. If you use Google earth or Gazetteer maps, you can't miss them.

Jim, if you look at the maps Todd posted, you'll see they often look round and grouped. If you use Google earth or Gazetteer maps, you can't miss them.

Also, look for them in flatter terrain, usually you'll find kettle ponds in out-wash plains where glacial melt water deposited thick layers of sand and gravel.

To go along with Todd's comment, along with kames, eskers are probably the most incredible type of glacial deposit, and they're easy to spot on a topographic map. These are formed by water flowing underneath the ice sheet through tubes or cracks, and leave behind long trails of mounded gravel. Sometimes you'll see these snake their way up and over hills due to the hydraulic pressure from the weight of water flowing down through the ice sheet, which could be well over a mile thick... water always flows downhill, except when it doesn't.

Thom, yes, that's some of the more enjoyable speculative parts of zoogeography, is retracing these steps. The genes have recently allowed us to retest hypotheses long held about who groups with whom. Of these, I think the Iowa and least darters, paired with the redside dace and lake chubsucker are the most impressive assemblage of "moraine jumpers". The hypothesis would hold that the Iowa, least and chubsucker are migrants from western refugia, the redside dace, from the east (at least the OH, MI, IN, PA, NY and ON portion, anyway).

Basically, there was much more connective, appropriate habitat for these guys historically, perhaps even in the outflows of these melting blocks of ice. Thus, they currently appear disjunct and isolated. It's probably easy to see how the redside dace moved northward, with its preference for cool clear streams, and the potential for headwater captures from basin to basin allowing transmission...

However, the remaining three have a preference for productive, vegetated environments. So there had to be some amount of time before they could move across boundaries. Part of it may have been related to the glacial lakes, as the "northern 3" as we might call them, made migrations along the glacial front in lake levels much higher than our current levels. It may also be that these blocks melting 1,000s of years later into kettle lakes gave them the gateway.

Jim, Koscikusko County is flat out loaded with these types of lakes. Perhaps the IL/IN chapter can organize a Tippecanoe Trip (I think this was in the works, no?) and include some of these habitats. There may be smaller kettles closer, I see some suspicious places around Lafayette. But that would be part of a Tippecanoe trip, I would think.

On closer inspection, yeah, these are probably the closest to you here in Lafayette. Look on Google Earth out SR 26 from Lafayette. There's a mess of them, some of them drained, others are still extant, and it looks like some of them even have vegetative mats, which may be "quaking earth" sphagnum mats.

Todd

Thanks to all for the info.

I second that !!! what an interesting thing, thanks again All you knowledgeable guys, this should keep me busy for awhile And Thank you Tony for bring this up. Great stuff for us more knowledge challenged

Edited by Jim, 01 April 2009 - 05:37 PM.

Yes, this has been really interesting. I spent quite a while this evening looking around and reading stuff online!

In Washington state we have 2 types of lakes that may be loosely called potholes but actually the "Pothole Lakes" here refer to lakes formed in the scablands formed by the ancient Missoula Lake glacial dams breaking and scouring out the scablands of Central and Eastern WA state which were later filled by seepage after the construction of Grand coulee Dam. True glacial pothole/kettle lakes are found in the North Central part of the state near the Canadian border
Pothole Lake proper is actually a man made reservoir formed to provide irrigation water to the fertile but arid areas of central WA. It is surrounded by literally hundreds of seep lakes which are often called "The potholes."
Both types proved to be excellent habitats for trout although many also have been stocked with spiny ray and catfish.

i used the map and it looks like there are some kettle lakes around the the GREAT MIAMI RIVER.
do you think there could be darters in these lakes?

You will find Iowa, least, johnny and logperch darters in those kettles.

Todd

You will find Iowa, least, johnny and logperch darters in those kettles.

Todd

crystal lake looks promising. they look like they maybe kettle ponds.just west of the mad river.
iowa darters are protected right.

Edited by CATfishTONY, 30 June 2009 - 09:55 PM.