Lake Frontenac was a
proglacial lake
In geology, a proglacial lake is a lake formed either by the damming action of a moraine during the retreat of a melting glacier, a glacial ice dam, or by meltwater trapped against an ice sheet due to isostatic depression of the crust around the ...
in the basin of what is now
Lake Ontario
Lake Ontario is one of the five Great Lakes of North America. It is bounded on the north, west, and southwest by the Canadian province of Ontario, and on the south and east by the U.S. state of New York. The Canada–United States border sp ...
.
[
]
The sudden influx of fresh water into the Atlantic, as the retreat of the
Laurentian Glacier
The Laurentide Ice Sheet was a massive sheet of ice that covered millions of square miles, including most of Canada and a large portion of the Northern United States, multiple times during the Quaternary glacial epochs, from 2.58 million years a ...
triggered a sudden drop in the lake's water level, may in turn have triggered the onset of the
Younger Dryas
The Younger Dryas (c. 12,900 to 11,700 years BP) was a return to glacial conditions which temporarily reversed the gradual climatic warming after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, c. 27,000 to 20,000 years BP). The Younger Dryas was the last stage ...
, 1000-year period of renewed cooling approximately 12000 years ago.
When the retreating ice opened a passage eastward around the north side of the Adirondack Mountains to the basin of Lake Champlain, the lake level fell and the outlet at Rome was abandoned. At this stage the ice barrier or dam rested about on the Frontenac axis of the pre-Cambrian rocks and the lake may therefore be called Lake Frontenac.
See also
*
Glacial Lake Iroquois
Glacial Lake Iroquois was a prehistoric proglacial lake that existed at the end of the last ice age approximately 13,000 years ago.
The lake was essentially an enlargement of the present Lake Ontario that formed because the St. Lawrence River down ...
*
Admiralty Lake
Admiralty Lake was a proglacial lake in the basin of what is now Lake Ontario.
The shoreline of Admiralty Lake was about lower than Lake Ontario. The shoreline of Glacial Lake Iroquois, an earlier proglacial lake, was much higher than Lake O ...
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Frontenac
Proglacial lakes
Geology of New York (state)
Glacial lakes of Canada