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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]
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 ...
The Cordilleran Ice Sheet has left remnants throughout the Northern Rocky Mountains, covering British Columbia and reaching into northern Washington State and Montana. The Cordilleran ice sheet has more of an Alpine style of many glaciers merged into a whole.
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]
As the depth of the water in Lake Missoula increased, the pressure at the bottom of the ice dam increased enough to lower the freezing point of water below the temperature of the ice forming the dam. This allowed liquid water to seep into minuscule cracks present in the ice dam.
The Cordilleran ice sheet also blocked the Clark Fork River and created Glacial Lake Missoula, rising behind a 2,000 feet (610 m) high ice dam in flooded valleys of western Montana. Over 2000 years the ice dam periodically failed, releasing approximately 40 high-volume Missoula Floods of water down the Columbia River drainage, passing through ...
The lake was the result of an ice dam on the Clark Fork caused by the southern encroachment of a finger of the Cordilleran ice sheet into the Idaho Panhandle (at the present-day location of Clark Fork, Idaho, at the east end of Lake Pend Oreille). The height of the ice dam typically approached 610 metres (2,000 ft), flooding the valleys of ...
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 ]