Acton Arboretum

Map of the Acton Arboretum. The esker is located on the southwestern tip of the Blog Loop.

Hello everybody!

Today I went to the Acton Arboretum, home of a special glacial feature: an esker! If you would like to learn more about how an esker forms, please check out this post.

Looking up to the top of the esker.

This esker is located on the southern tip of the Bog Loop Trail, one of the many paths in the arboretum. It was about 20 feet high and it runs north-south, which indicates that the glacier moved in that direction as well, since eskers typically run parallel to the direction of glacial flow.

The esker was made of well sorted sediment, which makes sense since all of the sediment would have been deposited by water. In fact, the stream that deposited all of the sediment to create this esker was one of the tributaries that fed glacial lake Sudbury many years ago.

The view down one side of the esker.

The view down the other side of the esker.

Another thing I noticed while I was walking through the Arboretum was how many stone walls there were throughout the woods. During colonial times, farmers would remove the stones used to make these walls out of the ground that they were plowing. One of the reasons that stone walls are so abundant in this area is because the soil is glacial till, sediment that was shoved along and eroded under the glacier. Glacial till is poorly sorted, so having large rocks in it is very common. Unfortunately, it does not lead to easy farming...

The Acton Arboretum is also renowned for its flowers, and when I visited, many were in full bloom.

Have a fantastic day!

Image citations:

Arboretum Map. Digital image. Acton Conservation Land. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 May 2013. <http://www.actontrails.org/images/mArboretum.jpg>.