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Temporal and Spatial Relations of Late
Quaternary Valley and Piedmont Glaciers in Tom Miner Basin, Montana
(also see Fluvial Geomorphology
).
Glacial Lake Tom
Miner occupied portions of the Tom
Miner Basin in what is now southwestern Montana. The
lake formed, when a lobe of the
late Pleistocene northern Yellowstone outlet glacier flowed into the
basin, and
blocked the flow of water to the Yellowstone
valley. Local alpine glaciers occupied
many of the basin’s tributary valleys, and calved into this proglacial
lake. A geographic information system
was used to reconstruct the extent, depth and volume of Glacial Lake
Tom Miner
at various lake levels. The locations of
erratics and strandlines were used to construct the elevation of each
lake
standstill. A digital elevation model
(DEM) of the current basin was then used to determine the approximate
extent,
area, depth and volume of the lake at various levels.
At least nine different lake levels were
identified based on the field mapping of strandlines, glacial erratics
and
abandoned channels. Preliminary results
indicate that the maximum length of the lake was approximately 12 km,
and
maximum width was approximately 5 km.
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