Lake Ojibway developed following the withdrawal of the Laurentide Ice Sheet in northern Ontario and Quebec, Canada.
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Lake Ojibway was a prehistoric lake in what is now northern Ontario and Quebec in Canada. Ojibway was the last of the great proglacial lakes of the last ice age.
The draining of Lake Ojibway is a possible cause of the 8.2-kiloyear event, a major global cooling that occurred 8,200 years BP. ^ Coleman, Arthur Philemon (1909).
In geology, a proglacial lake is a lake formed either by the damming action of a moraine during the retreat of a melting glacier, a glacial ice dam, or by meltwater trapped against an ice sheet due to isostatic depression of the crust around the ice.
Examples in Great Britain include Lake Lapworth, Lake Harrison and Lake Pickering. Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire and Hubbard's Hills in Lincolnshire are examples of a glacial overspill channel created when the water of a proglacial lake rose high enough to breach the lowest point in the containing watershed. ^ a bAsher-Bolinder, Sigrid (1988).
The movement of a glacier may flow down a valley to a confluence where the other branch carries an unfrozen river. The glacier blocks the river, which backs up into a proglacial lake, which eventually overflows or undermines the ice dam, suddenly releasing the impounded water in a glacial lake outburst flood also known by its Icelandic name a jökulhlaup. Some of the largest glacial floods in North American history were from Lake Agassiz. In modern times, the Hubbard Glacier regularly blocks the mouth of Russell Fjord at 60° north on the coast of Alaska.
The receding glaciers of the tropical Andes have formed a number of proglacial lakes, especially in the Cordillera Blanca of Peru, where 70% of all tropical glaciers are. Several such lakes have formed rapidly during the 20th century. These lakes may burst, creating a hazard for zones below. Many natural dams (usually moraines) ...
Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire and Hubbard's Hills in Lincolnshire are examples of a glacial overspill channel created when the water of a proglacial lake rose high enough to breach the lowest point in the containing watershed.
In some cases, such lakes gradually evaporated during the warming period after the Quaternary ice age. In other cases, such as Glacial Lake Missoula and Glacial Lake Wisconsin in the United States, the sudden rupturing of the supporting dam caused glacial lake outburst floods, the rapid and catastrophic release of dammed water resulting in the formation of gorges and other structures downstream from the former lake. Good examples of these structures can be found in the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington, an area heavily eroded by the Missoula Floods.
Parts of the former lake are now Lake Huron, Georgian Bay, ...
Many natural dams (usually moraines) containing the lake water have been reinforced with safety dams. Some 34 such dams have been built in the Cordillera Blanca to contain proglacial lakes. Several proglacial lakes have also formed in recent decades at the end of glaciers on the eastern side of New Zealand's Southern Alps.
The Hubbard Glacier closed off the Russell Fjord from Disenchantment Bay in 2002 to cause the waters behind the glacier to rise 61 feet (19 m) over 10 weeks in a proglacial lake until they broke through.