Home > Industry/Domain > Water bodies > Glaciers

Glaciers

A glacier is a large persistent body of ice that forms where the accumulation of snow exceeds its ablation (melting and sublimation) over many years, often centuries. Glaciers slowly deform and flow due to stresses induced by their weight, creating crevasses, seracs, and other distinguishing features. They also abrade rock and debris from their substrate to create landforms such as cirques and moraines. Glaciers form only on land and are distinct from the much thinner sea ice and lake ice that form on the surface of bodies of water.

Contributors in Glaciers

Glaciers

Iceberg

Water bodies; Glaciers

A block of ice that has broken or calved from the face of a glacier and is floating in a body of marine of fresh water. Alaskan icebergs rarely exceed 500 feet in maximum dimension. In order of ...

Distributary

Water bodies; Glaciers

A tongue of glacier ice that flows away from the main trunk of the glacier. This may result from differential melting changing the gradient of part of a glacier.

Crescentic gouge

Water bodies; Glaciers

Any curved mark or fracture produced by plucking or chipping of the glacier's bed. Larger than chatter marks, typically the horns of these gouges point up glacier.

Debris cone

Water bodies; Glaciers

A cone or mound of debris-covered ice, with a thick enough sediment cover to protect the ice from melting.

Downwasting

Water bodies; Glaciers

The thinning of a glacier due to the melting of ice. This loss of thickness may occur in both moving and stagnant ice. Also called Thinning.

Pleistocene

Water bodies; Glaciers

The epoch of geologic time, informally called the 'The Great Ice Age' or the 'Glacial Epoch', that began ~1.8 million years ago and ended ~8,000 years ago (see the CVO's Geologic Time Scale). During ...

End moraine

Water bodies; Glaciers

A cross-valley, ridge-like accumulation of glacial sediment that forms at the farthest point reached by the terminus of an advancing glacier.

Featured blossaries

addiction

Category: Health   2 33 Terms

Fanfiction

Category: Literature   2 34 Terms