The Glacial Lake Agassiz Project is a multi-disciplinary project that is reconstructing the early landscape associated with Glacial Lake Agassiz and identifying the ways in which late-glacial environments impacted the earliest human populations in central North America.

 

 Glacial Lake Agassiz was the largest of several proglacial lakes that formed in central Canada during the late Pleistocene. Although short-lived (~12,000 - 8,000 BP), this lake was vast, covering nearly 1 million km2 with a drainage basin extending from the Arctic Ocean, to the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean (Figure 1). In central Manitoba - the deepest portion of the Agassiz basin - water depth exceeded 200m! Today, geomorphic evidence of this giant lake includes numerous relict beaches and wave-cut scarps that mark Agassiz's old shoreline (Figure 2). Several Paleoindian sites have also been found near some of these beaches, suggesting that ancient human populations once thrived on this cold coast.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recently, the history of Agassiz has stimulated considerable interest among researchers because the rapid drainage of freshwater from this lake into the north Atlantic may have caused a brief "cold snap" around 11,000 BP known as the Younger Dryas. In effect, heat transport into the northern hemisphere relies in part on the northward movement of warm, salty, water and its subsequent overturn in the north Atlantic. The outflow of low-salinity water (derived ultimately from Agassiz) into the Atlantic may have temporarily stopped this thermohaline "conveyor belt", producing colder sea surface and atmospheric temperatures characteristic of the Younger Dryas. During this climatic oscillation, the first human populations were expanding across the Americas and many of the Ice Age megafauna were becoming extinct.

 

Figure 2. Ancient Shoreline of Glacial Lake Agassiz.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Project co-director Dr. Matthew Boyd of the Department of Anthropology, Lakehead University has been conducting geoarchaeological research in proglacial lake basins (including Agassiz) for several years. As part of the Glacial Lake Agassiz Project research team, Dr. Boyd will be collaborating with scientists from Canada and the USA.

 

Research associated with the Glacial Lake Agassiz Project is currently being conducted at two locales on the eastern and western margins of the former Agassiz basin (Figures 1 & 3).