The Tintah-Campbell gap and implications for glacial Lake Agassiz drainage during the Younger Dryas cold interval

Abstract

Reconstructions of glacial Lake Agassiz paleogeography and drainage have been an important contribution to formulating a hypothesis in which glacial Lake Agassiz drainage to the Atlantic Ocean initiated the Younger Dryas cold interval. This study evaluates the lake level and outlet history of Lake Agassiz as recorded by strandlines visible on lidar digital elevation models from North Dakota and Minnesota. The former lake levels are warped due to glacial isostatic adjustment. Older levels have experienced more uplift and therefore have more curvature. The strandline data establish that the Moorhead lowstand of Lake Agassiz was bracketed by the strongly diverging Campbell and Tintah lake levels, which creates a vertical gap between the former lake levels. This gap exists due to a lake level drop of ∼90 m when the Laurentide Ice Sheet retreat opened a lower outlet, which must have been a northwest outlet to the Arctic Ocean. By applying an exponential decay rebound model, this event dates to 12,180 ± 480 cal yr BP, post-dating the beginning of the Younger Dryas at 12,900 cal yr BP. Eastern drainage outlets to the Atlantic Ocean through the Laurentian Great Lakes that were contemporaneous with the onset of the Younger Dryas cannot be ruled out, but if these outlets existed, their duration of occupation was short-lived and not characterized by significant drawdown events within glacial Lake Agassiz.