Giant Glacial Boulder

Ice reached eastern Nebraska more than once, and long ago. Geologists Charles W. Rovey II and Greg Balco, studying tills in Nebraska and western Iowa, found seven tills separated by four mature buried soils, which they read as five major glaciations, all pre-Illinoian. The two oldest tills carry reversed magnetic polarity and are more than two million years old; others are younger than 1.3 million years. In southeastern Nebraska the ice reached about as far west as the Little Blue River, where erratics and probable tills turn up in Jefferson and eastern Thayer counties.

What the plaque says

Giant Glacial Boulder This boulder is one of the largest "erratics" ever recovered in the Belmont area, and was found in excavations one-quarter mile east of this point. It was carried to this area thousands of years ago by the ice of a continental glacier and then dropped as the ice melted. The boulder was moved by the ice from the basement (Precambrian) rocks exposed in the vicinity of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It is composed of Sioux sandstone and quartzite. The harder areas of quartzite are well defined. There are numerous smaller boulders along the ridge just east of Belmont Park, together with prominent frost cracks in the glacial-melt clay and silt (till). It appears that the Belmont (beautiful hill) ridge resulted from a standing glacier which melted and left a terminal moraine, composed of clay, silt, and erratics. Glaciers entered eastern Nebraska many times during the great "Ice Age" coming from the north and east. On occasion the glacial ice sheet must have been at least several hundred feet thick in this location. Belmont Construction Company Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Nebraska State Capitol — 2.8 mi
  Bertram Goodhue's 400-foot tower on the prairie, built in four phases from 1922 to 1932 and paid off on completion, home of the only one-house legislature in the country.
• Strategic Air Command & Aerospace Museum — 23 mi
  Two hangar-sized halls beside I-80 near Ashland holding the bombers and reconnaissance planes of the command that ran America's nuclear force from Offutt, south of Omaha, from 1948 to 1992.

More markers nearby

• The North Bottoms — 1.6 mi
• Pershing Rifles — 1.9 mi
• The Lewis-Syford House — 2.0 mi
• The University of Nebraska — 2.1 mi