| Glacial Lake Missoula |
Article Index for Glacial Lake |
Website Links For Glacial |
Information AboutGlacial Lake Missoula |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT GLACIAL LAKE MISSOULA | |
| former lakes | |
| montana | |
| geology of montana | |
| missoula, glacial lake | |
| natural history of montana | |
|
Glacial Lake Missoula was a prehistoric Proglacial Lake in western Montana that existed periodically at the end of the last Ice Age between 15,000 and 13,000 years ago. The lake measured about 7 770 km&2 (3,000 square miles) and contained about half the volume of Lake Michigan . The lake was the result of an Ice Dam on the Clark Fork River caused by the southern encroachment of a finger of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet into the Idaho Panhandle . The height of the ice dam typically approached 610 m (2,000 feet), flooding the valleys of western Montana approximately 320 km (200 miles) eastward. The periodic rupturing of the ice dam resulted in the Missoula Floods , which swept across Eastern Washington and down the Columbia River Gorge approximately 40 times during a 2,000 year period. SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
|
|
|