Glacier readvance during the late glacial (Younger Dryas?) in the Ahklun Mountains southwestern Alaska

An expansion of alpine glaciers during the latest Pleistocene produced an extraordinarily well defined end moraine system in the Ahklun Mountains, southwestern Alaska. These moraines, deposited during the Mount Waskey advance, are several kilometers beyond modern glacier termini, and ∼80 km upvalley of the late Wisconsin Ahklun Mountains ice cap terminal moraine. Eleven cosmogenic ¹⁰Be and ²⁶Al exposure ages on moraine boulders, combined with radiocarbon ages from a lake core upvalley of a moraine deposited during the Mount Waskey advance, suggest that the advance culminated between 12.4 and 11.0 ka, sometime during, or shortly following, the Younger Dryas event (ca. 12.9-11.6 ka). We believe that the Mount Waskey advance was a consequence of cooling during the Younger Dryas. These data further strengthen emerging evidence for Younger Dryas-age cooling of the North Pacific region.