A finger lake, also known as a fjord lake or trough lake, is "a narrow linear body of water occupying a
glacially overdeepened valley and sometimes impounded by a
morainic dam."
[Kotlyakov and Komarova (2007), 255.] Where one end of a finger lake is drowned by the sea, it becomes a
fjord
In physical geography, a fjord or fiord () is a long, narrow inlet with steep sides or cliffs, created by a glacier. Fjords exist on the coasts of Alaska, Antarctica, British Columbia, Chile, Denmark, Germany, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, Ice ...
or
sea-loch
''Loch'' () is the Scottish Gaelic, Scots and Irish word for a lake or sea inlet. It is cognate with the Manx lough, Cornish logh, and one of the Welsh words for lake, llwch.
In English English and Hiberno-English, the anglicised spel ...
.
Examples
New Zealand
![Lake Wakatipu and Remarkable Mountains](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Lake_Wakatipu_and_Remarkable_Mountains.jpg)
*
Lake Wakatipu
Lake Wakatipu ( mi, Whakatipu Waimāori) is an inland lake (finger lake) in the South Island of New Zealand. It is in the southwest corner of the Otago region, near its boundary with Southland. ''Lake Wakatipu'' comes from the original Māori nam ...
, Otago, South Island.
United Kingdom
England
* Many of the lakes of the
Lake District
The Lake District, also known as the Lakes or Lakeland, is a mountainous region in North West England. A popular holiday destination, it is famous for its lakes, forests, and mountains (or ''fells''), and its associations with William Wordswor ...
are finger lakes.
Scotland
![Loch Maree](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Loch_Maree.jpg)
* Many
lochs of Scotland
This list of lochs in Scotland includes the majority of bodies of standing freshwater named as lochs but only a small selection of the generally smaller, and very numerous, lochans. This list does not currently include the reservoirs of Scotla ...
are finger lakes. Some like
Loch Broom
Loch Broom ( gd, Lochbraon, "loch of rain showers") is a sea loch located in northwestern Ross and Cromarty, in the former parish of Lochbroom, on the west coast of Scotland. The small town of Ullapool lies on the eastern shore of the loch.
L ...
and
Loch Maree
Loch Maree ( gd, Loch Ma-ruibhe) is a loch in Wester Ross in the Northwest Highlands of Scotland. At long and with a maximum width of , it is the fourth-largest freshwater loch in Scotland; it is the largest north of Loch Ness. Its surface area ...
form
fjord
In physical geography, a fjord or fiord () is a long, narrow inlet with steep sides or cliffs, created by a glacier. Fjords exist on the coasts of Alaska, Antarctica, British Columbia, Chile, Denmark, Germany, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, Ice ...
and finger lake systems.
Wales
* Many of the Welsh
llyns.
United States
*
Finger Lakes
The Finger Lakes are a group of eleven long, narrow, roughly north–south lakes located south of Lake Ontario in an area called the ''Finger Lakes region'' in New York, in the United States. This region straddles the northern and transitional ...
, New York State
See also
* ''
Zungenbecken
A ''Zungenbecken'', also called a tongue basin or tongue-basin, is part of a succession of ice age geological landforms, known as a glacial series. It is a hollow that is left behind by the ice mass, as the snout of the glacier (German: ''Glets ...
''
*
References
Literature
*Hamblin, P.F. and Carmack, E.C., 1978. ''River‐induced currents in a Fjord Lake.'' Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 83(C2), pp. 885–899.
* Kotlyakov, Vladimir and Anna Komarova, ''Elsevier's Dictionary of Geography: in English, Russian, French, Spanish and German.'' Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2007. .
* Whittow, John (1984). ''Dictionary of Physical Geography''. London: Penguin, 1984. .
Glacial landforms
Lakes by type
{{Geo-term-stub