Glacial Lake London Case Study

Glacial Lake London was reconstructed based on Dreimanis work, present-day topography, and lacustrine sediments found on top of the Arva Moraine bluffs in Medway Creek. For the first time, the lake is presented in its entirety at a variety of possible water levels. Catastrophic drainage was reconstructed based on breach dimensions, and geomorphic features found in the Komoka spillway area. Both of these approaches suggest that modern peak hydrology generated by snowmelt or rain-induced floods is 1-2 orders of magnitude less than the discharge generated by an outburst flood from a glacial lake. Furthermore, modern Thames River occupies a small area during large floods and is clearly a misfit river channel. However, with current field evidence we cannot determine whether drainage was a single event of repeated lake fill and drain cycles. Moraine-dammed …show more content…
1) It offers an alternative explanation to gradual postglacial incision of Great Lakes rivers into glacial deposits and shows that proglacial lakes played a major role in landscape evolution of the Great Lakes and the American Midwest. 2) It proves that dramatic spillway topography can develop within low-relief moraine topography and complements the tunnel channel mechanism of rapid erosion and incision of the landscape that also occurs at receding ice margins, especially in mountainous terrains. 3) The deglaciation process was not only characterized by slow retreats of ice lobes but also by rapid removal of meltwater and ice by flowing water, thus allowing flora, fauna and humans to encroach on the exposed deglaciating landscape or disappear when the ice readvanced. 4) It is important to put rivers in formerly glaciated terrains in the right context as catastrophic landscape-shaping flood events still affect them and in most instances these rivers cannot be treated as ordinary self-formed alluvial