Lake Arkona was a brief prehistoric glacial lake stage in the Huron-Erie-Ontario basin, formed after Lake Maumee fell and before Lake Whittlesey, as the Laurentian ice sheet retreated and readvanced near the end of the last Ice Age. Its changing shorelines were shaped by shifting ice around Michigan’s thumb and nearby parts of Ontario, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. The lake’s chief surviving evidence is a series of beach ridges, sometimes three distinct gravel belts, though many were submerged, altered, or erased by later ice and rising waters. These remnants help show how early Great Lakes stages connected as ice movements repeatedly reorganized the region’s drainage.