The Kansan formation.  The Kansan drift consists for the most part of a sheet of clayey till carrying smaller bowlders than the later drift.  Few traces of drumlins, kames, or terminal moraines are found upon the Kansan drift, and where thick enough to mask the preexisting surface, it seems to have been spread originally in level plains of till.

The initial Kansan plain has been worn by running water until there are now left only isolated patches and the narrow strips and crests of the divides, which still rise to the ancient level.  The valleys of the larger streams have been opened wide.  Their well-developed tributaries have carved nearly the entire plain to valley slopes (Figs. 50 B, and 59).  The lakes and marshes which once marked the infancy of the region have long since been effaced.  The drift is also deeply weathered.  The till, originally blue in color, has been yellowed by oxidation to a depth of ten and twenty feet and even more, and its surface is sometimes rusted to terra-cotta red.  To a somewhat less depth it has been leached of its lime and other soluble ingredients.  In the weathered zone its pebbles, especially where the till is loose in texture, are sometimes so rotted that granites may be crumbled with the fingers.  The Kansan drift is therefore old.

The Wisconsin formation.  The Wisconsin drift sheet is but little weathered and eroded, and therefore is extremely young.  Oxidation has effected it but slightly, and lime and other soluble plant foods remain undissolved even at the grass roots.  Its river systems are still in their infancy (Fig. 50, A).  Swamps and peat bogs are abundant on its undrained surface, and to this drift sheet belong the lake lands of our northern states and of the Laurentian peneplain of Canada.

The lake basins of the Wisconsin drift are of several different classes.  Many are shallow sags in the ground moraine.  Still more numerous are the lakes set in hollows among the hills of the terminal moraines; such as the thousands of lakelets of eastern Massachusetts.  Indeed, the terminal moraines of the Wisconsin drift may often be roughly traced on maps by means of belts of lakes and ponds.  Some lakes are due to the blockade of ancient valleys by morainic delms, and this class includes many of the lakes of the Adirondacks, the mountain regions of New England, and the Laurentian area.  Still other lakes rest in rock basins scooped out by glaciers.  In many cases lakes are due to more than one cause, as where preglacial valleys have both been basined by the ice and blockaded by its moraines.  The Finger lakes of New York, for example, occupy such glacial troughs.

Massive terminal moraines, which mark the farthest limits to which the Wisconsin ice advanced, have been traced from Cape Cod and the islands south of New England, across the Appalachians and the Mississippi valley, through the Dakotas, and far to the north over the plains of British America.  Where the ice halted for a time in its general retreat, it left recessional moraines, as this variety of the terminal moraine is called.  The moraines of the Wisconsin drift lie upon the country like great festoons, each series of concentric loops marking the utmost advance of broad lobes of the ice margin and the various pauses in their recession.