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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 dammed up Glacial Lake Missoula at the Purcell Trench Lobe. [10] A series of floods occurring over the period of 18,000 to 13,000 years ago swept over the landscape when the ice dam broke. The eroded channels also show an anastomosing, or braided, appearance.
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 ]
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 ...
About 13,000 years ago in North America, the Cordilleran Ice Sheet crept southward into the Idaho Panhandle, forming a large ice dam that blocked the mouth of the Clark Fork River, creating a massive lake 2,000 feet (600 m) deep and containing more than 500 cubic miles (2,000 km 3) of water.
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]
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Greenland ice sheet as seen from space. An ice sheet is a body of ice which covers a land area of continental size - meaning that it exceeds 50,000 km 2. [4] The currently existing two ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica have a much greater area than this minimum definition, measuring at 1.7 million km 2 and 14 million km 2, respectively.