12000 years ago: A river born.As glaciers from lost ice recede,flood waters carve channel of Mississippi.
.The Mississippi river like all rivers,is in a constant state of charge.Various forms of the Mississippi river have flowed through an area for more than a million years.as we know it was primarily stupid during the most recent glacial stage of the great ice age,the Wisconsin period.
The Wisconsin glaciation period started about 75,000 years ago and ended about 12000 years ago when the north American climate began to warm.It was a world hardly recognizable today.
The melting of these enormous ice sheets that at their maximum,were 5000 to 10000 feet thick and covered hundreds of thousands of square miles,release tremendous amounts of water,forming huge glacial lakes, lake Agassiz,covered northwest Minnesota,parts of the north Dakota and the Canadian provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Ontario.The southern discharge outlet to this lake was called Glacial river warren,which eventually excavated the valley now occupied by the Minnesota river.
During the 3000 years that river warren carried water from these and other smaller glacial lakes,the Mississippi river valley was carved bluff to bluff and the resulting valley was approximately 250 feet deeper than it is today.
