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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]
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 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 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 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 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 ...
After each ice dam rupture, the waters of the lake would rush down the Clark Fork and the Columbia River, flooding much of eastern Washington and the Willamette Valley in western Oregon. After the lake drained, the ice would reform, creating Glacial Lake Missoula again. These floods have been researched since the 1920s.
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 ]