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The Cordilleran ice sheet covered up to 1,500,000 square kilometres (580,000 sq mi) at the Last Glacial Maximum. [11] The eastern edge abutted the Laurentide ice sheet. The sheet was anchored in the Coast Mountains of British Columbia and Alberta, south into the Cascade Range of Washington. That is one and a half times the water held in the ...
Unlike the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which may have taken as many as eleven thousand years to fully melt, [3] the Cordilleran ice sheet melted very quickly, probably in four thousand years or less. [4] This rapid melting caused floods such as the overflow of Lake Missoula and shaped the topography of the fertile Inland Empire of Eastern Washington. [5]
This advance included the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, which nucleated in the northern North American Cordillera; the Innuitian ice sheet, which extended across the Canadian Arctic Archipelago; the Greenland ice sheet; and the massive Laurentide Ice Sheet, [1] which covered the high latitudes of central and eastern North America.
The Laurentide Ice Sheet had a major effect on the climate. It was an ice sheet covering much of Canada, and parts of the northern United States in the Midwest and east. The Rocky Mountains separated the Laurentide Ice Sheet from the Cordilleran Ice Sheet. The Laurentide Ice Sheet had a cooling effect on the middle latitudes. [3]
In addition, the atypically linear string of glacial erratics that comprise the Foothills Erratics Train was created by the parallel, non-turbulent flowage of two very large ice masses—the Cordilleran Ice Sheet to the west, and the Laurentide Ice Sheet to the east—that occurred at the boundary between them.
The Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets overtook the majority of Canada and parts of the United States during the last glaciation. South of the glaciers, the major biomes on the continent were tropical semi-desert, subalpine parkland, temperate steppe grassland, and main taiga . [ 7 ]
Lake Bonneville had no river connection with the huge North American ice sheets. [10] While Lake Bonneville existed the patterns of wave- and current-forming winds were not significantly affected by the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets in northern North America. [11]
The Laurentide Ice Sheet continued to recede. Continued warming shrank the ice front towards present day Hudson Bay. Here, the Lake Agassiz northward outlet drained into the Tyrrell Sea. This breach dropped the water level below the eastern Kinojevis outlet. The drainage was followed by the disintegration of the adjacent ice front at about ...