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Howard 1907 · IGS 2024
The classic account meets the modern framework — and the ground turns out to be more than one ice sheet's work. Howard's county history states that three glacial lobes met at South Bend: the Michigan Lobe, the Saginaw Lobe, and the Maumee/Erie Lobe — the lobe now called Huron-Erie — with the Michigan Lobe overlapping only the county's northwest corner and the Saginaw reaching to about a mile northeast of South Bend. The governing modern source revises the picture without discarding it: the Indiana Geological & Water Survey's 2024 stratigraphic framework for the Saginaw Lobe's deposits (Antinao and colleagues, Indiana Journal of Earth Sciences) establishes north-central Indiana as an interlobate region — Lake Michigan Lobe deposits to the west and north, Huron-Erie to the east — long mapped as primarily the Saginaw Lobe's work but now shown to be multilobe, the Saginaw's surface extent significantly reduced, with up to several hundred feet of Quaternary sediment over bedrock. The framework's Elkhart Formation names the members that touch this county-scale ground: the Baugo Creek Member, a diamicton with glaciolacustrine deposits bounded sharply on the northwest by the St. Joseph River valley and overlapped on its southern edge by younger Huron-Erie sediment; the Newbury Member; and the Lagrange Member, predominantly glaciofluvial — meltwater-laid sand and gravel rather than ice-laid till. Stated as process for this township: Union Township's ground is not one ice sheet passing once, but stacked advances from the north and northeast and from more than one lobe, reworked by meltwater between retreats — and which lobe's till forms the immediate surface at any given section of the township is a question the published record reached does not answer at township scale.