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 Europe. Recently, research has been focused on understanding the sedimentology of these formations in an effort to determine the safety of continued use of the aquifers which are often found in them. Buried valleys are created when ancient river or stream valleys are present that predate the most recent glaciation, and since have been filled with glacial till and/or outwash. In the Pleistocene, advancement and retreat of glaciers carved out the preexisting valleys, and deposited the material that had accumulated in the glacier by the melting of either the glacial outwash or the melting of the ice that composed the