A Prof. Shows a Sentimental Attachment to Kettle Ponds

By Ellis Sant’Andrea

Robert Thorson loves kettle lakes.
Thorson, a professor of geology at the University of Connecticut, says that he is “really sentimentally attached to kettle lakes in a big way,” because he and his twin brother were raised each summer on Union Lake, a kettle lake in Minnesota.
Kettle lakes and ponds are bodies of fresh water “created by downward or inward melting of a stagnant block of ice,” he said. That definition comes from his new book, Beyond Walden.
In the Northeast, said Thorson, kettle ponds and lakes are underappreciated because “there is so much else to look at.” He added that the “kettle lake culture is much stronger in the Midwest.”
Thorson has been on the lecture circuit to discuss his new book and recently he talked about it and brought a slideshow at a program at UConn sponsored by the Connecticut State Museum of Natural History.
A kettle pond is less than 10 acres. This figure, said Thorson, was arbitrarily picked in 1634 in New Hampshire when people were figuring out their amounts of farmland. These ponds are perennial, meaning they are always filled with water, he said.
Walden Pond, a 102-foot-deep kettle pond, is located in Concord, Mass and was home to Henry David Thoreau from 1845 to 1847. It was here that conservation and management of the environment first became a concern, said Thorson, thanks to Thoreau’s book Walden.
“In fact,” Thorson pointed out, “not one kettle lake state joined the Confederacy.”
Thorson views his approach to geology as “environmental studies, not [environmental] science.” This is because kettle ponds, and many other aspects of geology, have a lot to do with “literature, history and feelings more than data,” he said.
He spent the beginning of his talk discussing what exactly constitutes a kettle pond.
“Kettle” comes from the water body’s pot-like appearance. Although they appear to be man-made, kettle ponds are not gouged out. They are filled with fresh water that is “meteoric,” meaning it originates as precipitation and becomes groundwater. None of the water in these ponds comes from glaciers, said Thorson.
Since they are groundwater fed, there are no inlets or outlets in kettle ponds. They are surrounded by steep banks and are sand dominant.
There are also several other types of kettle-prefixed bodies of water. A kettle hole is a kettle pond that has been dried out. Kettle pools are only filled with water seasonally. A kettle lake is over 10 acres, and a salt pond is a kettle body of water that has been breached.
At 62 acres, Walden Pond is technically a lake, said Thorson.
It is easy for development to occur on kettle lakes and ponds, he said, because they are already surrounded with sand and don’t require blasting.
However, “hyper-development” around them, such as septic tanks and sewer systems, may be destructive, he said.
The future of kettle ponds is also threatened by climate change. Thorson said that global warming could threaten fresh water supplies. If people turn to kettle ponds, they could dry them up.