Friends of the Pleistocene

54th Midwest Friends of the Pleistocene

May 16-18, 2008, De Kalb, Illinois

We invite you to spend the weekend with us examining the fascinating surficial geology of northeastern Illinois at the 54th Midwest FOP Field Conference. The trip is sponsored by the Illinois State Geological Survey with help from Northern Illinois University, the Illinois State Museum, and the University of Illinois–Chicago. We have arranged for a smorgasbord of sites that feature topics ranging from vertebrate sites to glacial doughnuts. The trip theme is about the deglacial history of the Lake Michigan lobe, but other things will be discussed in the field, such as glaciotectonics (folding of bedded clastic sediment) and till genesis. Some of the sites that we will visit include the Mastodon Gallery at Phillips Park, Aurora, new exposures of fossiliferous proglacial sediment at Wedron Quarry, and ice-walled lake plains at Wadsworth and Hampshire. We will try and make your time on the bus more enjoyable by tracking the trip route with GPS and showing the route progress on the bus TV monitors. Background maps will include shaded relief maps made from LiDAR and DEM data.

More details at www.isgs.uiuc.edu/about-isgs/events/fop/fop-2008.shtml

A shaded relief map of a 10-m DEM from NE Kane County, Illinois, reveals tens of pancake-shaped ice-walled lake plains nestled in the rolling topography of the Bloomington Morainic System.

Deltaic sandy sediment exposed at the Thelan sand and gravel pit in NW Lake County, Illinois

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