Randall Carlson

Randall, we finally meet.

Yeah, it's great.

I've been looking forward to this now for, well, more than weeks, months, actually.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

What a great loaded question, but exactly the kind of thing I love to dive into.

I got interested in the ice ages growing up in Minnesota many decades ago because where we lived was at the margin of what is called the superior lobe of the great Laurentide ice sheet.

In a minute, I could pull up a graph and we could see exactly what I'm talking about in terms of a map.

But right where I grew up was at the margin.

Now, at that margin, the ice sheet expanded and it contracted.

And it created a very unique landscape that was partially created by the glaciers and also partially created by the melting of the glaciers at the end of the Ice Age.

So we had property on the lake, and I can remember my dad showing me a book

I was probably seven or eight years old, and there was a picture in there.

I think, as I remember, it wasn't obviously a photograph, but it was a sketch or something showing what it would have looked like during the Ice Age.

And I thought, wow, you mean there was thousands of feet of ice here?

And the answer was yes, but...

It was because of the ebb and the flow of the glaciers there that it sculpted this landscape.

So I was brought up in that landscape, and all the effects of the Great Ice Age were all around me.

The lake that we lived on was basically a meltwater puddle left over from the recession of the gigantic ice lobe.

It was a lobe.