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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.
Industry: Water bodies
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Glaciers
Push moraine
Water bodies; Glaciers
A ridge or pile of unstratified glacial sediment that is formed in front of the ice margin by the terminus of an advancing glacier, bulldozing sediment in its path.
Drift
Water bodies; Glaciers
A collective term used to describe all types of glacier sedimentary deposits, regardless of the size or amount of sorting. The term includes all sediment that is transported by a glacier, whether it ...
Calving
Water bodies; Glaciers
The process by which pieces of ice break away from the terminus of a glacier that ends in a body of water or from the edge of a floating ice shelf that ends in the ocean. Once they enter the water, ...
Roche moutonnee
Water bodies; Glaciers
An elongated, rounded, asymmetrical, bedrock knob produced by glacier erosion. It has a gentle slope on its up-glacier side and a steep- to vertical-face on the down-glacier side.
Glacier
Water bodies; Glaciers
A large, perennial accumulation of ice, snow, rock, sediment and liquid water originating on land and moving down slope under the influence of its own weight and gravity; a dynamic river of ice. ...
Ice-cored moraine
Water bodies; Glaciers
A moraine ridge consisting of a drape of sediment overlying a mass of stagnant ice.
Rock flour
Water bodies; Glaciers
Fine-grained, silt-size sediment formed by the mechanical erosion of bedrock at the base and sides of a glacier by moving ice. When it enters a stream, it turns the stream's colour brown, gray, ...