The Dubawnt Lake palaeo‐ice stream: evidence for dynamic ice sheet behaviour on the Canadian Shield and insights regarding the controls on ice‐stream location and vigour

Abstract

We report evidence for a major ice stream that operated over the northwestern Canadian Shield in the Keewatin Sector of the Laurentide Ice Sheet during the last deglaciation 9000–8200 (uncalibrated) yr BP. It is reconstructed at 450 km in length, 140 km in width, and had an estimated catchment area of 190000 km2. Mapping from satellite imagery reveals a suite of bedforms (‘flow‐set’) characterized by a highly convergent onset zone, abrupt lateral margins, and where flow was presumed to have been fastest, a remarkably coherent pattern of mega‐scale glacial lineations with lengths approaching 13 km and elongation ratios in excess of 40:1. Spatial variations in bedform elongation within the flow‐set match the expected velocity field of a terrestrial ice stream. The flow pattern does not appear to be steered by topography and its location on the hard bedrock of the Canadian Shield is surprising. A soft sedimentary basin may have influenced ice‐stream activity by lubricating the bed over the downstream crystalline bedrock, but it is unlikely that it operated over a pervasively deforming till layer. The location of the ice stream challenges the view that they only arise in deep bedrock troughs or over thick deposits of ‘soft’ fine‐grained sediments. We speculate that fast ice flow may have been triggered when a steep ice sheet surface gradient with high driving stresses contacted a proglacial lake. An increase in velocity through calving could have propagated fast ice flow upstream (in the vicinity of the Keewatin Ice Divide) through a series of thermomechanical feedback mechanisms. It exerted a considerable impact on the Laurentide Ice Sheet, forcing the demise of one of the last major ice centres.