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Originally Posted by ScreamingViking
Partially true -- but it wasn't that deep, and it was created due to ice dams from the retreating ice sheet preventing meltwater and runoff from flowing out. I'm trying to recall university physical geography here, but the surface of Lake Iroquois was about ~100 feet higher than Lake Ontario, and its shoreline was a few km inland of the current one. There is evidence of shorelines and sandbars in Ontario and New York state. A prime example is Burlington Heights, where the High Level Bridge is: a sandbar from Iroquois that carries on southeastward as the rise that skirts downtown Hamilton and goes through Durand... Television City is proposed to be built upon it. This lake existed around 13,000 years ago though, when the ice age was coming to an end.
The escarpment doesn't represent a lakeshore. It's been there for millions of years, and was there before the last glaciation, though that glacial period likely radically altered it through erosion.
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when the glaciers recede the water gushes from under them which forms the carved out areas you see, so as the glaciers retreated back during the ice age they did a great deal of great lake scoopage, probably contributing to the excess water what would have built up and then been kept in by the dammed areas the glaciers still kept intact.
A lot of detonation has been also done along the escarpment to carve out the highways so we don't really see them as they would have naturally been when the city was founded either.. hence all the random jut outs of layers of strata.