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Geologic Map of West Virginia. West Virginia's geologic history stretches back into the Precambrian, and includes several periods of mountain building and erosion. At times, much of what is now West Virginia was covered by swamps, marshlands, and shallow seas, accounting for the wide variety of sedimentary rocks found in the state, as well as its wealth of coal and natural gas deposits.
The river's path traveled through modern-day West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, finally emptying into the Gulf of Mexico, which at the time extended to southern Illinois. The glaciers of the Ice Age soon began to block the Teays, effectively damming the river and forming Lake Tight, near what is now Chillicothe, Ohio.
The lake changed sizes as the ice front moved and as the volume of water changed. At its largest, it rose to 1,100 feet (340 m) above sea level. Eventually the water found a low divide near New Martinsville, West Virginia, creating an outlet to the south and west into the Teays River. Thus, the upper Ohio network of river valleys came into form.
Ice Mountain was also detailed in Hu Maxwell and Howard Llewellyn Swisher's History of Hampshire County, West Virginia: From Its Earliest Settlement to the Present (1897), O. F. Morton's History of Hampshire County (1910), and Homer Floyd Fansler's "Ice Mountain: Nature's Deep Freeze" in the July 1959 issue of West Virginia Conservation. [6]
The Cordilleran ice sheet covered up to 1,500,000 square kilometres (580,000 sq mi) at the Last Glacial Maximum. [11] The eastern edge abutted the Laurentide ice sheet. The sheet was anchored in the Coast Mountains of British Columbia and Alberta , south into the Cascade Range of Washington .
The environment of West Virginia encompasses terrain and ecosystems ranging from plateaus to mountains. Most of West Virginia lies within the Appalachian mixed mesophytic forests ecoregion , while the higher elevations along the eastern border and in the panhandle lie within the Appalachian-Blue Ridge forests .
Paleontology in West Virginia refers to paleontological research occurring within or conducted by people from the U.S. state of West Virginia. West Virginia's fossil record begins in the Cambrian . From that time through the rest of the early Paleozoic , the state was at least partially submerged under a shallow sea.
The southern glacial maximums extended south to Washington state near Olympia in the west and to Spokane, the Idaho Panhandle, and much of Western Montana at the eastern glacial edge. At its eastern end the Cordilleran ice sheet merged with the Laurentide Ice Sheet at the Continental Divide , forming an area of ice that contained one and a half ...