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The ice sheet shapes the continent
The Laurentide ice sheet was the ice cap covering Canada and the northern United States through the ice ages, gone by around twelve thousand years ago. The Laurentide ice sheet was the largest in the northern hemisphere and held enough water to lower the world's oceans by around sixty metres. Its weight pressed the crust down, and the land is still rising — the Hudson Bay region lifts about a centimetre a year, ten thousand years after the ice went. The ice also laid the fertile till soils of the Midwest, and is therefore a direct precondition for the American grain belt.
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