Some 225,000 years ago, most of what is now Illinois was buried under the ice of the Illinoian glacier. Two earlier glaciers had covered large parts of Illinois, and another, known as the Wisconsinan glacier, came into the state later, about 50,000 to 70,000 years ago (fig. 16).
The relatively small glaciers in the United States today, such as those in the northern Rocky Mountains, are concentrated in valleys and are called valley glaciers. The glaciers that covered Illinois were parts of huge ice sheets that extended over much of the North American continent and are called continental glaciers. They spread over most of Canada, then pushed southward to bury New England and a great area in the north-central part of the United States north of the Ohio and Missouri Rivers.
As the glacial ice edged slowly southward from Canada, it froze fast to and picked up soil and loose pieces of rock, with enormous force tore away huge chunks of bedrock, and mixed and ground these materials together (fig. 17).
Into Illinois the glacier carried rock materials from Canada, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan; other rock fragments were picked up in Illinois as the ice front advanced. When the glacier melted, it left behind its load of rock flour and rock fragments, much of it as a gray clay containing pebbles, cobbles, and boulders. Geologists call such deposits glacial till.
[Illustration: Figure 16—Extent of the exposed deposits of the Wisconsinan, Illinoian, and Kansan glaciers in Illinois, and the unglaciated areas of the state.]
UNGLACIATED WISCONSINAN GLACIER Freeport Fulton Peoria Decatur Charleston ILLINOIAN GLACIER Kewanee Waterloo Carbondale Harrisburg KANSAN GLACIER UNGLACIATED Hardin
The ice in the continental glaciers usually crept forward, sometimes slowly, sometimes more rapidly. Whether the front of a glacier moved forward or back depended on the balance between the rate of forward motion of the ice and the rate of melting. When the ice advanced faster than it melted, the front of the glacier moved forward. When the glacial ice melted faster than it moved forward, the front of the glacier receded. When the rates of melting and advance were about equal, the front of the glacier stood still or moved back and forth in a narrow zone.