The Old Kentucky River system was a major contributor to the Teays River, draining southwestern Ohio and much of eastern Kentucky. The trunk river flowed northward from southeastern Kentucky throughout Frankfort and Carrollton, and then past Cincinnati and Dayton, joining the Teays River near Springfield, Ohio. North of the glacial boundary, which lies along the modern Ohio River, the course of the Old Kentucky River has been modified, and is today largely buried by drift. Although dissection is extensive to the south, there are many remnants of this entrenched and broadly meandering Teays-age valley system and of its sub-upland predecessors. These valleys contain areas of upward-fining, deeply weathered gravel, composed mainly of rounded quartz, chert, and silicified limestone pebbles derived from the headwaters of the system. Modern rivers have been entrenched 30 to 100 m below the Old Kentucky River valley and its main tributaries, the Old Licking and South Fork. The Old Kentucky River system was severed from the Teays when glaciation dammed its downstream reaches, forcing a reversal in flow direction between its junction with the Teays in west-central Ohio and Carrollton, Kentucky, and causing westward overflow into the Old Ohio River system. Piracy by the Old Ohio may also have contributed to the integration of the Old Kentucky and Old Ohio River basins. Ponded sediment is present in some of the now-abandoned valley remnants east of Cincinnati. As a result of glacial damming, the headwaters of the Teays River in southeastern Ohio and West Virginia overflowed westward across the Manchester divide into the Old Kentucky River drainage basin. All of these events led to establishment of the modern Ohio River system.

Abstract During the advances and retreats of the Laurentide Ice Sheet in North America, drainage routes were disrupted and dammed, and new basins were formed by erosion and deposition. Some basins were completely enclosed by rock or sediment, whereas others formed closed depressions only as long as glacial ice served as one of their margins. During the early history of nearly all of these basins, ice bounded the lakes and, in many cases, helped control their level. Across most of central North America the Laurentide Ice Sheet advanced upslope for hundreds of kilometers from the Hudson Bay Lowland before crossing the continental divide into the Mississippi and Atlantic drainage basins. As a result, water was impounded over a large region of the Hudson Bay watershed, being confined partly by the glacial margin and partly by the elevation of land to the south. Strictly speaking, only lakes that lay in direct contact with ice or its marginal deposits are considered proglacial lakes. However, most workers would include lakes where meltwater was a significant part of their hydrological budget, even though they may have been some distance beyond the glacial margin. In this chapter I describe the main factors controlling the formation of proglacial lakes and explain how these factors, and the processes within the lakes, influenced their sedimentation and history. I also speculate on how these lakes may have influenced ice flow and deglaciation. A large part of the chapter is devoted to a discussion of the histories of major proglacial lakes in North America associated with the southern Laurentide Ice Sheet and to their interrelationship with each other and with the retreating glacial margin. The timing of meltwater flow into the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean during deglaciation is examined and compared to the isotopic record of sediments in these basins.