The area straddles part of the Keewatin Ice Divide (KID) which was defined by Lee and others from the GSC in the 1950s as the zone occupied by the last glacial remnants of the Laurentide Ice Sheet west of Hudson Bay. The Keewatin Ice Divide is delineated by the spatial arrangement and orientation of eskers, ribbed moraines and streamlined landforms.

J.B. Tyrrell in 1897 was the first to report on the existence of a "Keewatin Glacier" centered in the Keewatin District of the Northwest Territories (now south-central Nunavut). He proposed a relative ice flow chronology characterized by centres of outflow moving progressively to the southeast. Prest and others in 1968 summarized the work of Tyrrell and subsequent work by Lee, Craig, and Fyles on the Glacial Map of Canada, showing cross-cutting striations with few relative ages determined. In the early 1970s, the Geological Survey of Canada started a major field program in Keewatin based primarily on till sampling to assist mineral exploration. Ice flow indicators indicating pervasive ice flow towards Hudson Bay and glacial dispersal trains of distinctive Dubawnt Supergroup lithologies extending southeast from Baker Lake to the coast led Shilts and others to redefine the Keewatin Ice Divide as a relatively static, long-lived feature of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. No evidence for ice flow from Hudson Bay was found, refuting the idea of a long-term center of an ice sheet over Hudson Bay as modeled by Flint in 1943. The predominance of a southeastward flow in the Baker Lake area from a divide located north and west of the last position of the Keewatin Ice Divide was recognized but it was suggested that the KID was a reasonable approximation of the position of a dispersal centre in Keewatin throughout the entire last glaciation.