Mackenzie River Great Slave Lake, at Fort Resolution, Northwest Territories. The Slave is by far the largest river flowing into the lake, with an annual flow of 108 km (87 million acre-feet). It contributes about 77% of the overall inflow, and forms a large delta where it enters the lake. Other rivers entering Great Slave Lake area the Taltson, Lockhart and Hay Rivers, the latter of which also extends into Alberta and BC. The Mackenzie River issues from the western end of Great Slave Lake about south-west of Yellowknife. The channel is initially several kilometres wide but narrows to about at Fort
Mackenzie River the northwest, establishing the present flow direction to the Arctic. Fluvial deposits and other erosional evidence indicate that around the end of the Pleistocene, about 13,000 years ago, the Mackenzie channel was scoured by one or more massive glacial lake outburst floods unleashed from Lake Agassiz, formed by melting ice west of the present-day Great Lakes. At its peak, Agassiz had a greater volume than all present-day freshwater lakes combined. This is believed to have disrupted currents in the Arctic Ocean and led to an abrupt 1,300-year-long cold temperature shift called the Younger Dryas. The Mackenzie carries a very large