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Mohawk River
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The Mohawk River is a long river in the U.S. state of New York. It is the largest tributary of the Hudson River and it meets it in the Capital Region, a few miles north of the city of Albany, New York. The river is named for the Mohawk Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy. It is a major waterway in north-central New York.
its source in Lewis County the Mohawk River flows generally east through the Mohawk Valley, passing by the cities of Rome, Utica, Amsterdam, and Schenectady before entering the Hudson River near Albany.
river and its supporting canal, the Erie Canal (a part of the New York State Canal System, called the New York State Barge Canal for much of the 20th century), connect the Hudson River and port of New York with the Great Lakes at Buffalo, New York.
The Schoharie Creek and the West Canada Creek are the principle tributaries to the Mohawk River.
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Encyclopedia
The Mohawk River is a long river in the U.S. state of New York. It is the largest tributary of the Hudson River and it meets it in the Capital Region, a few miles north of the city of Albany, New York. The river is named for the Mohawk Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy. It is a major waterway in north-central New York.
Course
From its source in Lewis County the Mohawk River flows generally east through the Mohawk Valley, passing by the cities of Rome, Utica, Amsterdam, and Schenectady before entering the Hudson River near Albany.
River modifications
The river and its supporting canal, the Erie Canal (a part of the New York State Canal System, called the New York State Barge Canal for much of the 20th century), connect the Hudson River and port of New York with the Great Lakes at Buffalo, New York.
The Schoharie Creek and the West Canada Creek are the principle tributaries to the Mohawk River. Both of these tributaries have several significant dams including the Hinckley Dam on the West Canada and the Gilboa Dam on the upper reaches of the Schoharie Creek.
History
The river has long been important to transportation and migration to the west as a passage between the Allegheny and Adirondack highlands. The fertile Mohawk Valley also attracted early settlers. A number of important battles of the French and Indian War and the Revolution were fought here.
In the early nineteenth century water transport was a vital means of transport both people and goods. A corporation was formed to build a canal, known as the Erie Canal, off the Mohawk River to Lake Erie. The canal cut shipping costs to Lake Erie by 95%.. It also simplified and reduced the difficulties of westward settler migration.
Discharge and flow characteristics
The average volume of water that flows through the Mohawk is about 5.2 cubic kilometers (~1.5 cubic miles) every year. Much of the water flows through the watershed in the spring as snow melts rapidly and enters the tributaries and the main trunk of the river. The maximum average daily flow on the river occurs between late March and early April. For the period between 1917 to 2000, the highest mean daily flow is c. 18k cfs (18,000 cubic feet per second) as measured at Cohoes, near the confluence with the Hudson. The lowest mean daily flow of 1.4k cfs occurs in that same time interval in late August. There is a long record of significant and damaging floods along the entire length of the river .
Because the river and its tributaries typically freeze in the winter, the spring melt is commonly accompanied by ice floes that commonly get stuck and jammed along the main trunk of the river. This annual spring break up typically occurs in the last few weeks of March, although there are plenty of floods that have occurred before or after this time. These ice jams can cause considerable damage to structures along the riverbanks and on the floodplain. The most severe flood of record on the main trunk of the Mohawk River was the spring break up flood that occurred from 27-28 March, 1914. This flood caused a tremendous amount of damage to the infrastructure because it was a spring break up flood with enormous amounts of ice. Ice jams of some significance occur about every other year. .
Geologic history
The Mohawk watershed drains a large section of the Catskill Mountains, the Mohawk Valley proper, and a section of the southern Adirondack mountains. All three regions have distinct bedrock geology, and the underlying rocks get progressively younger to the south. Overall, this part of New York is represented by lower Paleozoic sedimentary rocks that unconformably overlie the Grenville-aged (Proterozoic, here about 1.1 billion years old) metamorphic rocks of the Adirondacks . In the watershed, these rocks are only significant in the headwaters of the West Canada Creek. Much of the main trunk of the Mohawk River sits in Cambro-Ordovician carbonates (limestone) and Middle Ordovician sandstones and shales. The southern tributaries (Catskill Mountains) are underlain by a thin sequence of Devonian limestones that are overlain by a thick sequence of sandstones of shale of the Catskill Delta, which is also of Devonian in age. During the Pleistocene (c. 1.8 to 0.01 Ma), the watershed was extensively modified by continental glaciation. As a result of glacial scour and deposition, the surficial deposits in much of the watershed are poorly sorted boulder- and clay-rich glacial till. During deglaciation, there were several glacial lakes that left varved clay deposits (see varve}. Finally, in the final stages of deglaciation at ~13,350 yr ago, the catastrophic draining of Glacial Lake Iroquois, a pro-glacial lake, was through what would become the modern Mohawk Valley. In this final phase of the geologic story, an enormous discharge of water cause local deep scour features (i.e. the Potholes at Little Falls), and extensive sand and gravel deposition, which is one of the key sources of municipal groundwater (i.e. Scotia Delta).
See also
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