Seminar Details

Seminar Lab Date: October 13, 2025
Seminar Lab Subject: The Upper Mississippi Valley: Proglacial Origins to Modern Evolution
Seminar Lab Presenter: Andrew Wickert, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Minnesota
Link to Presenter https://cse.umn.edu/esci/andrew-wickert
Second Link to Presenter https://www.linkedin.com/in/andywickert

Seminar Lab Location:

In-person only at University of Minnesota, Keller Hall, Room 3-230

Lecture start time 7:00 PM CT.

Seminar Lab Detail:

Summary: The upper Mississippi River valley formed and integrated when early Pleistocene glaciations dammed north-flowing rivers, causing them to overtop and incise ancient drainage divides to the south. These steeplands evolved in the ca. 1–2 million years that followed, growing a network of tributaries that dissected the surrounding plateaus. When we step forward to the Wisconsin ice-sheet advance, ca. 30,000 years ago, sediments sourced from glacial erosion filled the Mississippi valley, forming high floodplains. During deglaciation, proglacial lakes trapped coarse sediments, and sediment-starved meltwater entrained and incised through these proglacial river deposits, leaving them high above the modern Mississippi. Both Indigenous and Euro-American cities were built on the resultant high terrace surfaces. The arrival of Euro-American agriculture increased erosion 10x beyond background rates, filling valleys with sediments. Looking to the future of climate and land-use change, we hope to use these stories from the upper Mississippi valley to benchmark process-based models and better predict how today’s actions shape tomorrow’s landscapes.
 
Biography: Prof. Andrew Wickert conducts field investigations, develops physics-based theory, designs and deploys instrumentation, and builds numerical models to understand and forecast how rivers and landscapes change.