To most visitors, Komoka Provincial Park west of London is little more than a serene area for hiking and nature watching.

To Nati Bergman, it’s a 13,000-year-old gold mine — every rock, gravel outcropping and ravine telling the epic tale of a colossal flood that drained glacial Lake London in a matter of days and left the Thames River in its stead.

“I think the story is not well-told,” says Bergman, a Western University geographer whose doctoral thesis examines the scope of that flood.

“We need to make this place famous.”

Bergman is an outspoken advocate of the river, a scientist whose words tumble in multiple directions as he describes how important the area’s geological history is in shaping the London of the future.

In his thesis — drawing on the work of his hero, the late Western University geographer Aleksis Dreimanis and under the supervision of thesis advisers Marco Van De Wiel and Steve Hicock — Bergman has mapped and modelled the how and where and when of that colossal flood.

He’s preparing to present his work during his doctoral examination next month.

Bergman can read the region’s story in flow marks, cliffs and detritus that remain in the flood’s spillway, which is now Komoka Provincial Park.

For him, the drama of that flood makes the park unique among provincial parks — a selling feature that could lead to a dynamic geological interpretive trail in a place that’s too long been under-appreciated and under-promoted.

And he says it’s a good starting point for recognizing that the streams and rivers and lakes of this region are linked both in a common history and future.

We can’t take clean water for granted, he argues. We can’t limit river restoration to within small municipal boundaries.

“This is a place rich with water. You have 20% of the world’s fresh water in these five lakes and that makes you manage it in a wasteful way.”

deb.vanbrenk@sunmedia.ca ?

WHAT SHAPED US