Glacial lake Glacial lake A glacial lake is a lake with origins in a melted glacier. They are formed when a glacier erodes the land, and then melts, filling the hole or space that it has created. Near the end of the last glacial period, roughly 10,000 years ago, glaciers began to retreat. A retreating glacier often left behind large deposits of ice in hollows between drumlins or hills. As the ice age ended, these melted to create lakes. This is apparent in the Lake District in Northwestern England where post-glacial sediments are normally between 4 and 6 metres deep. These lakes
Buried valley glacier itself. Buried valleys are traditionally V- or U-shaped due to the natural shape of valleys, but buried valleys can exhibit different shapes if there were any sort of erosional events after the glacier had finished retreating. The ability to hold groundwater comes from the makeup of the glacial outwash deposits. The glacial outwash deposits of these preexisting valleys mainly consist of coarser materials, such as sand and gravel. Since these materials are coarser, when there is a soil that is almost purely made of these materials, the pore space of the soil increases. This increased pore space creates more