The Land Itself: A Sea That Left Its Bones

Stand anywhere in North Dakota on a clear day and the horizon looks wrong, too far away, too flat, as if the earth has been pulled taut like canvas over a frame. What you are standing on is the floor of a vanished sea. For hundreds of millions of years, a shallow inland ocean covered the middle of the continent, depositing the limestone, shale, and organic sediment that would one day become both the richest wheat soil on earth and the Williston Basin oil fields.

When the sea withdrew, glaciers came four separate times over the last two million years, the last sheet retreating only twelve thousand years ago. A glacier does not so much move as grind. It scrapes the land, rearranges it, drops its rubble in long ridges called moraines, and leaves behind a landscape of shallow lakes and prairie potholes that today numbers in the hundreds of thousands.

North Dakota holds more wetland potholes than any other state. On a spring morning the sky above the central prairie fills with the sound of migrating waterfowl before you can see a single bird. The Missouri Coteau, the broad, hilly plateau that runs diagonally across the center of the state, is glacial till piled twenty to thirty feet deep.

The Red River Valley in the east is the opposite: the absolute flat bed of ancient Lake Agassiz, a glacial meltwater lake larger than all the modern Great Lakes combined, which drained roughly eight thousand years ago and left behind soil so dark and fertile that early settlers called it black gold before anyone had drilled a drop of petroleum. The land is not empty. It is layered, each layer a clock running at a different scale.