The Arnaud River (formerly known as the Payne River) is a river in Nunavik, Canada, flowing from the low plateaux of the Ungava Peninsula through a series of glacial lakes to Ungava Bay. Its mean discharge is approximately 15km³ per year, but the river flows only in the summer as it is frozen to several metres for the rest of the year. The total length of the river is about 280 kilometres, but there are several main channels in the upper reaches of the river, most of them unnamed and hardly sighted even by the native Inuit. The Nunavik Region of Quebec, Canada Nunavik (ᓄᓇᕕᒃ) is a region making up the northern third of the province of Quebec, Canada. ... For alternate uses of the term, see Plateau (disambiguation). ... The Ungava Peninsula in northernmost Quebec is bounded by Hudson Bay to the west, Hudson Strait to the north, and Ungava Bay to the east. ... An ice sheet is a mass of glacier ice that covers surrounding terrain and is greater than 50,000 km² (19,305 mile²). The only current ice sheets are Antarctic and Greenland; during the last ice age at Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) the Laurentide ice sheet covered much of Canada... A lake is a body of water surrounded by land. ... Ungava Bay is a large bay in northeastern Canada separating Nunavik (far northern Québec) from Baffin Island. ... Inuit woman Inuit (Inuktitut syllabics: ᐃᓄᐃᑦ, singular Inuk or Inuq / ᐃᓄᒃ) is a general term for a group of culturally similar indigenous peoples of the Arctic who descended from the Thule. ...

Most of the basin is almost totally barren owing to the harsh climate - the mean temperature is only about 7°C even at the height of summer and continuous permaf r ost extends deep from only half a metres below the surface. The only vegetation is low shrubs at the lower levels, for no trees grow within the Arnaud basin even in the most sheltered sites, and the river freezes for too long to make hydroelectric development feasible. Hydroelectric dam diagram The waters of Llyn Stwlan, the upper reservoir of the Ffestiniog Pumped-Storage Scheme in north Wales, can just be glimpsed on the right. ...

The basin of the Arnaud River, though intensely glaciated for almost the whole of the Quaternary - ice sheets are known to have been thicker over the basin at the Last Glacial Maximum than they are over Antarctica today - is the site of a major meteorite impact about a million years ago that has been surprisingly well preserved, probably because the exposed surface rocks are exceedingly old and the meteorite might have been deposited in such a way as to ensure preservation during the long glaciations. The Quaternary Period is the geologic time period from the end of the Pliocene Epoch roughly 1. ... The Last Glacial Maximum refers to the time of maximum extent of the ice sheets during the last glaciation, approximately 21 thousand years ago. ... Bacubirito in Culiacan, Mexico is second largest Meteorite in the Americas, fifth largest in the World A meteorite is a relatively small extra-terrestrial body that reaches the Earths surface. ... Glaciation, often called an ice age, is a geological phenomenon in which massive ice sheets form in the Arctic and Antarctic and advance toward the equator. ...

External links

• Parc des Pingualuit

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