A PRELIMINARY ACCOUNT OF LATE “WISCONSIN” GLACIATION IN MELVILLE PENINSULA, N.W.T.*

• Published in: The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien
• Main Author: SIM, VICTOR W.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 1960
• Subjects: Foxe Basin; Fury; Haviland Bay; Hudson; Hudson Bay; Melville Peninsula; Rae; Rae Isthmus; Southampton Island; Fury and Hecla Strait; Ice cap
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0064.1960.tb01843.x; https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1111%2Fj.1541-0064.1960.tb01843.x; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1541-0064.1960.tb01843.x

SUMMARY The glacial movements discussed here took place when deglaciation was well under way in northeastern North America. At that time, small, local centres of active ice dispersal developed. One of these lay in the area of eastern Foxe Basin. A smaller independent ice cap may also have existed on Southampton Island, or in northern Hudson Bay, at roughly the same time, as Bird suggests. Two major directions of ice movement across the peninsula are clearly indicated. North of Rae Isthmus (Figure 1 3. 1) movement appears to have been across the peninsula in a west‐northwest direction. A study of drumlinoids, roches moutonnkes, and crag‐and‐tail features suggests this conclusion. Swaths of limestone‐charged ground moraine tailing out towards the west from the eastern sedimentary lowland, and a decrease in the number of sedimentary erratics with increasing distance west across the upland, also support the theory of east‐to‐west glacial movement. An eastward projection of the line of general trend of these glacial indicators suggests that the source area for the ice lay in southeastern Foxe Basin. A second major direction of glacial advance is indicated on Rae Isthmus. Here drumlinoid topography with a pronounced southeast‐northwest alignment apparently resulted from movement to the northwest from a dispersal centre on Southampton Island or in northern Hudson Bay. Whether or not the ice moving westnorthwest from Foxe Basin and northwest from Southampton Island were contemporaneous in their passage across the peninsula is difficult to say. The apparentabsence of any interlobate material in the area north of Haviland Bay suggests that they were not precisely so; the more recent movement may have removed in its passage any débris left by the earlier one in the area over which it passed at this stage. Over most of the peninsula, then, the most recent ice movement appears to have been westward and northwestward as a broad lobe extending at its maximum from the latitude of Fury and Hecla Strait southward to at least the ...