‘Fragment of an ancient land’

Moraines and heads of outwash plains on Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket and Cape Cod mark positions of the ice front during retreat. The also define lobes of the Laurentide ice sheet. The relationship between the deposits and lobes can be seen in this figure. Native Americans thousands of years ago lived on some of the land now underwater east and south of the Cape.

“East and ahead of the coast of North America, some thirty miles and more from the inner shores of Massachusetts, there stands in the open Atlantic the last fragment of an ancient and vanished land.’’

— From Henry Beston’s (1888-1968) The Outermost House (1928), about his time living in a beach shack on Cape Cod’s Nauset Beach.