This week students took a trip to Washtenaw County 400 million years ago, when it was completely submerged under water! When we begin to think about place, we ask: how did this space become what it is today? Naturalist Shawn Severance from County Farm Park visited with our 3/4s to introduce us to two major turning points in the history of Washtenaw County, and Michigan in general, that have provided us with the land we inhabit today.
The first was 400 million years ago in the Devonian period, when Michigan was completely submerged under water. The second was 14,000 years ago, when Michigan was covered in a mule high glacier! Shawn provided students with artifacts from these periods, such as trilobite and fern fossils, mammoth tusks, petoskey stones, and other items. We also looked at maps documenting glacial coverage of Washtenaw County to unpack how the border of the glaciers paved the way for many roads we use today. As we studied these items, we were continuously drawn back to Shawn’s original question: does land have a memory? How do these events, which happened so long ago, still show up in the landscape around us today? We took a hike around SK and County Farm Park to look for evidence from these two periods. We examined soil samples, collected seeds, and looked at the topography of the landscape, trying to tell a story of how this place has evolved over time.
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