A Year at Hammonasset

a landscape series

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Meigs Point

…. about 17,500 years ago the climate cooled for a while, so that [an] ice front stayed along a line from Hammonasset through Ledyard to Queens River, RI. The ice was still moving south, but it was melting at the same rate, so sediments piled up along the front. This formed the Hammonasset-Ledyard-Queens River moraine. It is a double moraine, meaning there are two parallel moraines close together.

This happened because a short warmer period melted the ice farther back to the north again, then a cooler period stopped the melting for a short period, before the ice again melted back to the north. Here in the park the Meigs Point Trail rocks are the older moraine, the Cedar Island Trail rocks are the younger one….The most obvious sediments are the large boulders along the shore at the east end of the beach at Meigs Point. These are the coarser materials left from the moraine after the waves have been attacking it for a few thousand years. The finer materials near the water have washed out into the Sound, helping to make the beaches, while the huge boulders remain. But farther from the shore the fines still remain in the moraine, supporting a variety of vegetation. A close look at these rocks while walking along the Meigs Point trail will reveal a variety of rock types. Many are striped with light and dark minerals. These are called gneiss. Some of these bands are folded. These metamorphic rocks were once buried deeply, where they were subjected to intense pressure at high temperatures. Some rocks are pink and gray or black, with the large grains randomly arranged. These are granite, a rock which was once melted, then cooled slowly at some depth below the surface.

Courtesy of the CT DEP