An independent site about Canada as physical geography — the processes that made the ground
Autray
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Five grounds · seventeen entries
Every entry is one place, located
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Section 05

Ice

What the glaciers left behind. The Laurentide Ice Sheet stood three kilometres deep over Hudson Bay and is gone. It left boulders where it melted, hollows where blocks of it were buried, and a crust that is still coming back up.

A house-sized boulder of a different rock type sitting alone on flat prairie grassland, wide, big sky
Plate IA boulder with no relation to the rock it sits on, set down where the ice carrying it melted.Photo: Glacial erratic in Coronation Park, Crosby · Wikimedia Commons

Entries in this section

3 entries
  • Erratics

    Boulders carried far from their parent rock and dropped where the ice melted.

    Jasper to Montana · Foothills Erratics Train · Glacial transport and deposition
  • Prairie potholes

    Thousands of shallow depressions left by stranded ice blocks, now wetlands.

    Prairie Pothole Region · MB, SK, AB · Buried ice blocks, collapse
  • Isostatic rebound

    The crust is still rising where the ice sheet pressed it down, measurably each year.

    Hudson Bay · James Bay lowlands · Mantle recovery under a lost load

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