19196

The article claims that Lake Agassiz became the world’s largest lake. It seems to me that the same conditions should have occurred in Asia. Shouldn’t you compare Lake Agassiz to glacier-dam-produced lakes in Asia and contemporary freshwater versions of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea?

Robert W. Davis
Millburn, N.J.

According to Martin Jakobsson of the University of New Hampshire in Durham, the three largest Eurasian glacial lakes at the end of the last ice age together covered a total of 907,000 square kilometers, an area about 8 percent larger than Lake Agassiz at its largest. But those shallower bodies held only one-fifth the water that Lake Agassiz did. Freshwater Lake Agassiz covered more than twice the area of the Black or Caspian Sea, but it didn’t hold as much water as the Black Sea .–S. Perkins