Some have studied the Lake Missoula glacial dam breaking West and having created the Coulees of Eastern Washington. Who's studied the glacial dam breaking South and having cleared the Hudson River valley, forming the Verrazano Narrows, NY Harbor, Staten and Long Island, and washing through to the Atlantic Continental Shelf?
1 Answer
" Who's studied the glacial dam breaking South and having cleared the Hudson River valley, forming the Verrazano Narrows, NY Harbor, Staten and Long Island, and washing through to the Atlantic Continental Shelf?"
There's a USGS group at Woods Hole that's done a bit of work on this back in 2004:
A catastrophic meltwater flood event and the formation of the Hudson Shelf Valley -From the paper:
The ancestral Hudson River is generally thought to have had a long history that began in the Late Cretaceous. Uplift and tilting of the margin, resulting in landward erosion and seaward growth, continued into the Tertiary.
The Hudson River was repeatedly downcut into Cretaceous coastal-plain strata during periods of Pleistocene marine regression. Scouring of the lower Hudson River during the last glaciation formed a fiord in the region north of New York City. More recent fluvial downcutting was amplified by drainage of late Wisconsinan glacial lakes, culminating in the failure of the terminal moraine dam at the Narrows, which is a break in the Harbor Hill moraine between Staten Island and Long Island, New York. Borehole data across the Narrows suggest that more than 100 m of Pleistocene and Cretaceous sedimentary material was eroded as a result of this breaching event. Uchupi et al. (2001) proposed that deposition of sediment lobes on the continental shelf and erosion of the HSV were a consequence of this catastrophic drainage.
You might scour the references at the back of the paper and do some googling to find any more recent follow-up work they may have done. You could also try this guy at Woods Hole: Jeffrey P. Donnelly. He's first author on a paper titled:
The paper is short on the drama of breached glacial dams, but long on how the sudden discharge of freshwater into an ocean alters circulation to cause a brief period of climate change. Fascinating stuff!