Greetings:

I have located the original paper by Wells, hosted on the UNC library website: Linked HERE . It includes a slightly different B&W photo, dated 3/22/38.

Wells was quite emphatic that he read a catastrophic genesis for the bays. The referenced paper discusses at length how he felt the majority of bays never hosted bodies of water, but simply grew peat deposits many feet in depth on their moist bottoms. Note that peat bogs do not form in open water. His interpretation of the bay lakes which are in existence today is because that - for a very few - they lie low between major rivers and are controlled by water table levels, while many of the bays with water exist because peat within bays had been burned out in the dry periods of the middle Holocene, based on significant findings of charcoal. His assessment of the peat at the lowest levels is "over 20,000" years old, and might be 40,000 to 100,000 years old.

Current consensus amongst scientists says that the bays' rims - and their ovoid planforms - were entirely the result of wave action by standing water. Those bays must be large enough to offer significant reaches to enable wave formation.

Here is Well's 1938 photo:



- Michael