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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 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.
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 floor of the Teays Valley in West Virginia is 200 feet (61 m) above the entrenched Kanawha and Ohio valley floors, and its bedrock floor is at least 15 feet (4.6 m) above them. The ‘deep stage’ apparently was cut mainly after the diversion of the upper Kanawha (Teays) drainage to the Ohio River (Stout, Ver Steeg, and Lamb, 1943, pp. 78 ...
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 ...
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 .
West Virginia is situated in the Appalachian Mountains of the Upper South region of the 48 contiguous states. Usually considered part of the South Eastern United States, West Virginia is bounded on the northeast by Pennsylvania and Maryland, on the southeast by Virginia, on the northwest by Ohio, and on the southwest by Kentucky.
Glaciation in this area of the plateau removed the sharp relief that is seen in the plateau's unglaciated areas. The line of the distant peaks approximates the level of a peneplain that was uplifted to form the plateau. Aerial view of Allegheny Plateau terrain surrounding Weston, West Virginia