Glacial lake

A lake formed or held by glacial processes, including ice excavation and dams made of ice or glacial sediment. Its basin or barrier is shaped by glaciers or their deposits.

Glacial erosion: The wearing away of bedrock and sediment by moving glacier ice and its debris. Erosion can excavate basins that later fill with meltwater.
Glacier: A persistent mass of ice that moves under its own weight over land. Glaciers provide the ice, erosion, and sediment involved in forming these lakes.
Lake Agassiz: A vast proglacial lake that occupied parts of North America during the last glacial period. Its changing outlets and drainage reshaped landscapes across central North America.
Jökulhlaup: An Icelandic term for a sudden flood, especially one released from beneath or beside a glacier. These floods are a characteristic hazard of ice-dammed lakes.
Subglacial lake: A body of liquid water beneath a glacier or ice sheet. Its isolation beneath ice makes its water circulation and ecological conditions difficult to measure.
Moraine-dammed lake: A lake impounded by a ridge of sediment deposited at a glacier's edge. Moraine ridges can block meltwater and create a common type of glacial lake.
Glacial till: Unsorted sediment deposited directly by glacier ice, ranging from clay to large boulders. Till can form barriers that impound water at a glacier's margin.
Lake Missoula: An ice-dammed lake that formed in Montana during the last glacial period. Repeated drainage of the lake carved the Channeled Scablands.
Channeled Scablands: An eroded landscape in eastern Washington carved by repeated catastrophic floods. Floods from glacial Lake Missoula created this distinctive terrain.
Antarctic subglacial hydrology: The study of water movement and storage beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Hidden lakes may connect through drainage systems that influence ice motion.

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