How a New Glacial History Paradigm Explains Northeast Alabama’s Tennessee River-Gulf of Mexico Drainage Divide Area Topographic Map Drainage System Evidence

Abstract

A new and fundamentally different glacial history paradigm (developed by using Missouri River drainage basin topographic map evidence) is tested by using topographic map drainage system and erosional landform evidence located along and near the northeast Alabama Tennessee River-Gulf of Mexico drainage divide (Tennessee Valley Divide). The new paradigm describes a thick North American continental ice sheet (located where continental ice sheets are usually reported to have been) which was erosive and heavy enough to create and occupy a deep “hole” and which produced massive meltwater floods which first flowed across the deep “hole’s” rising southern rim and which were subsequently forced by deep “hole” rim uplift to flow inside the deep “hole” rim and finally to flow northward into the deep “hole” itself. Northeast Alabama topographic map evidence including divide crossings (low points along drainage divides), barbed tributaries, and other unusual drainage features verify new paradigm predictions that large and prolonged south-oriented floods first flowed across the northeast Alabama Tennessee Valley Divide (which was a segment of the new paradigm’s deep “hole” southern rim) and were subsequently diverted along the rising deep “hole” rim and finally reversed to reach the Mississippi River valley (which became the deep “hole’s” only remaining southern exit) and to form what is today the southwest-, northwest-, and north-oriented Tennessee River.