Lake Connecticut

Glacial Lake Connecticut
Glacial Lake Connecticut
Location	Over what is now Long Island Sound and coastal Connecticut
Primary inflows	Meltwater from the Laurentide Ice Sheet
Primary outflows	The Race (tidal outlet between the North Fork of Long Island and Fishers Island)
Basin countries	United States
Max. length	About the same size as present-day Long Island Sound
Average depth	78 feet (24 m) (average depth of Long Island Sound today)

Glacial Lake Connecticut formed over what is now

North Fork of Long Island and Fishers Island. For a time, much of the lake bed was exposed to wind-driven erosion: the cue is found in soundings that reveal regional unconformities

in the sediment bed of Long Island Sound.

The fore-edge lake formed by glacial meltwater expanded to be about the same size as present-day Long Island Sound; it may have been connected at times with similar freshwater lakes in Block Island Sound and Buzzards Bay, while sea level was low. The fairly shallow average depth of 78 feet (24 m) of today's Long Island Sound is the result of fine lake-bottom sediments deposited as glacial outwash slowed in Lake Connecticut. Suspended as rock flour, the fine sediments would have rendered Lake Connecticut a turquoise blue-green.

The end of Lake Connecticut was marked by a series of intervals of salt water incursion after about 15,000

isostatic rebound

of land depressed by the former weight of ice sheets adjusted to one another.