Lake Agassiz

"By comparison, today's Great Lakes are puny. But not so long ago, in North America's heartland, there was a lake so vast it swallowed most of Manitoba and surged through parts of Ontario, Saskatchewan, North and South Dakota and Minnesota. It's called Lake Agassiz and some believe it was the largest lake the world has ever known. Born of the melting sheets of ice that had covered Canada and the northern U.S. for millennia, it was a force of nature for 6,000 years. During that time, Lake Agassiz's waters carved huge valleys, blasted through solid rock to create canyons, and changed the climate of Europe for a thousand years. Today, we share its legacy--the seemingly endless prairie that was once lake bottom; the magnificent beaches along Lakes Winnipeg and Manitoba; one of the largest river deltas in the world, and the meandering rivers that sometimes threaten springtime havoc. Yet most know little about this powerful architect of our landscape and our lives. Bill Redekop's Lake Agassiz: The Rise and Demise of the World's Greatest Lake will change that. Enthralling, enlightening and often amusing, it tells the story of the huge phantom lake from its discovery by American and Canadian geologists in the late 19th century, through the contentious tracing of its ever-shifting shorelines and its enormous impact on the North American terrain and the global climate, to its effects on the way we live now. The story of Lake Agassiz is one of superlatives: inconceivable tsunamis that bored through solid rock, colossal outpourings of glacial water that created a mini-ice age in Europe, tributary torrents that gouged huge valleys and created a delta larger than Prince Edward Island, and an enormous watershed that redistributed species from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico. For millennia, nothing more dominated North American geography than Lake Agassiz. Illustrated with more than 150 photographs and maps, Lake Agassiz: The Rise and Demise of the World's Greatest Lake also includes the author's tale of his 500-kilometre journey along a portion of the Campbell Beach, one of the world's most prominent glacial beaches, north and west from the U.S. border to Swan River, Manitoba."--