Definition
Proglacial lake. Ice-contact lake occurring adjacent to the frontal margin of a glacier.
Introduction
A proglacial lake abuts and extends beyond the glacier terminus. Many proglacial lakes are moraine-dammed, whereas others form in basins created by isostatic depression near the ice margin. These latter lakes commonly are buttressed by the ice itself. Not all ice-dammed lakes, however, are proglacial, so these terms are not strictly synonymous. Some ice-dammed lakes, for instance, form laterally, such as when a glacier dams river flow in a side valley. Possibly the best-known ice-dammed lake was Glacial Lake Missoula, which occupied thousands of square kilometers of western Montana and Idaho before draining catastrophically (many times) to the Pacific.
Proglacial lakes can be ephemeral in nature or persist hundreds, if not thousands of years. The transient nature of some lakes results from several processes, including drainage (catastrophic or otherwise) caused by breaching...
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Hall, B.L. (2011). Proglacial Lakes. In: Singh, V.P., Singh, P., Haritashya, U.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Snow, Ice and Glaciers. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2642-2_420
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