Video
Currents of Change
Transcript
Currents of Change 3:30 minute story on the geology of the Missouri National Recreational River Narrative Script
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Tim Cowman: River definitely has a personality to me. One things that you really notice about it when you’re on it is that there’s just this constant flow of water and things are constantly changing. The geology of Missouri river is very interesting. I’m standing here on the South Dakota side of the river and I look across the river to Nebraska what I see are these huge bluffs outcropping. And what these bluffs are is is they are the actual segments that were deposited at the bottom of a sea millions of years ago. Buried in those sediments are fossils of that time. Marine reptiles such as mosasaurs and plesiosaurs show us just what life was like.
The western interior seaway was here until about sixty-five million years ago. Over time, things changed. The sea dried up. And what we now known as the Missouri river actually used to drain northeastward roared into the Hudson Bay area of Canada.
Starting about two million years ago, some large ice sheets began to advance. They rerouted the drainage of the Missouri river, forced to flow through to a southeasterly direction, and placed where we see it today.
There’s a lot of processes happening within the river there are quite impressive. The building of sandbars and the taking away the sandbars happen from year-to-year means that when you’re out on the river from year-to-year it’s never the same experience.
When I think of the Missouri river, I think of the river of change. To me, it’s always changing itself within the channel, and it’s always changing the landscape around it.
There’s several things part of this river but we really want to make sure that we preserve. That’s these backwaters, like the Gunderson Backwater. Backwards and wetlands are certainly a significant part of a healthy river system. In other cases it’s large islands like Goat Island. Those are magnificent characteristics and you’re not going to find on a small river system.
For me, the most fulfilling part of geology is variety that you encounter: its whole bunch of different types of rock formations that were deposited from this western interior seaway of millions of years ago to the glacial terrain that has highly modified what we see today.
Whether you’re on the river in a boat or a kayak, you really are impressed by the massive size of this river and just the power of the current. You really feel like you’re part of that moving water and, it’s a pretty humbling experience.
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Description
The geology of the Missouri National Recreational River.
Duration
3 minutes, 38 seconds
Credit
NPS/Argentine Productions
Date Created
11/10/2018
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