GenGateway

As a collar county of Chicago, Kane County has recently undergone tremendous growth. In 1996, the population in Kane County was 370,361, and it is projected to grow to about 540,000 by the year 2020 (Kane County Regional Planning Commission 1996). The north-south-trending Fox River valley has been a natural corridor of urban development along which are found the largest and oldest communities in the county, such as Aurora, Elgin, St. Charles, Batavia, and Geneva (inside back cover). These communities obtain part or all of their municipal water from groundwater contained in Quaternary sand and gravel aquifers found primarily in buried bedrock valleys (Curry and Seaber 1990).

The geology of Kane County includes gently dipping Paleozoic sedimentary rocks that are covered by as much as 350 feet of Quaternary glacial sediment (Graese et al. 1988, Wickham et al. 1988). Kane County is a region of varied geomorphologic character. Like much of northeastern Illinois, Kane County has curvilinear moraines that were formed by active glacial ice, but the county also has numerous landforms such as kames and eskers that were formed by stagnant ice. During our field trip, we will examine deposits of both active and stagnant ice, sample fossils of hardy tundra plants and invertebrates that lived adjacent to the Lake Michigan Lobe, discuss the postglacial vegetation and paleohydrology, and consider the effects of mining on the depth of fish-stocked ponds.