Geologist Patricia Manley of Middlebury College will speak on “The Evolution
and Sedimentary Record of Lake Champlain, Vermont” on Wednesday, Feb. 4, at 5 p.m. in
Olin 115.
Her talk is part of the “Lakes and Environmental Change” series sponsored by
Environmental Studies.
Besides discussing the evolution of the lake basin, Manley will detail the recent
discovery she and her husband made of one of Benedict Arnold's gunboats at the bottom
of Lake Champlain. During the 1776 “Battle of Valcour Island,” when British and
American forces fought for control of the lake, one of Arnold's fleet sank.
Some 220 years later, the geologists used side scan sonar – the same technology
used by Union faculty and staff to map Ballston Lake – to find and image the sunken
gunboat, an artifact one historian called “…the most significant maritime
discovery in American history in the last half century.”