Glacial Lake Maumee

Lake Maumee was a proglacial lake and an ancestor of present-day Lake Erie. It formed about 14,000 Years Before Present (YBP) as the Huron-Erie Lobe of the Laurentide ice sheet retreated at the end of the Wisconsin glaciation. As water levels continued to rise the lake evolved into Lake Arkona and then Lake Whittlesey.

As the ice sheet retreated at the end of the last ice age, it left meltwater in a previously existing low-lying area that was the valley of an eastward-flowing river known as the Erigan River that probably emptied into the Atlantic Ocean following the route of today's Saint Lawrence River. Some geologists (see M.C. Hansen, references below) think that the Erigan could have been a segment of the preglacial Teays River system. The glaciers destroyed or disturbed most of the preglacial drainage patterns and enlarged and deepened the Erigan basin.

Lake Maumee is the first of a series of glacial lakes, which occupied the Erie basin. It was preceded by a few small, disconnected lakes which lay between the ice margin and the southern divide of Erie basin. The name Lake Maumee was first applied in 1888 by G. R. Dryer, of the Indiana Geological Survey, in an official report on the geology of Allen County, Indiana.

As the Erie Lobe retreated to the northeast, it left large debris deposits called moraines running at right angles to its line of retreat. One of these, called the Fort Wayne Moraine, was left at the site of present-day Fort Wayne, Indiana, where it acted as a dam that held back the waters of the lake. When the water was at its highest point, about 800 feet above sea level (ASL) (244 m), it left beach ridges that later became the routes of trails and highways. During this stage, the waters of the lake, possibly in response to an advance of the ice front at the lake's eastern end, overtopped a "sag" in the Fort Wayne Moraine. This caused a catastrophic drainage of the lake known as the Maumee Torrent that scoured a one- to two-mile-wide outlet running southwest to the Wabash River known as the Wabash-Erie Channel.

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