Brampton’s Kettle Lakes

Saturday May 28, 2016

Heart Lake Conservation Area contains two kettle lakes which formed when the last ice age retreated.  Around 20,000 years ago the Wisconsin Ice Age reached it’s maximum with an ice sheet that stretched from Newfoundland to British Columbia and south to Ohio and Illinois.  In the Toronto area the ice was over 1 kilometer thick or about twice the height of the CN Tower.  The advancing ice acted like a giant ice scoop clearing everything in it’s path.  Melting glaciers it deposited this debris in many ways.  Rivers of meltwater carried nearly straight lines known as eskers and the 7 kilometer long Brampton Esker runs south from Heart Lake.  The debris the glacier contained was left behind in the form of outwash.  Sometimes larger chunks of the iceberg would calve away and get buried by the glacial till in the outwash.  Later, when the ice melted it left behind a hole that…