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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.

Contributors in Glaciers

Glaciers

Kettle

Water bodies; Glaciers

A depression that forms in an outwash plain or other glacial deposit by the melting of an in-situ block of glacier ice that was separated from the retreating glacier-margin and subsequently buried by ...

Glacier table

Water bodies; Glaciers

A rock that is balanced on a pedestal of ice, and elevated above the surface of a glacier. The rock protects the pedestal of ice from melting by insulating it from the sun.

Jökulhlaup

Water bodies; Glaciers

A glacier outburst flood resulting from the failure of a glacier-ice-dam, glacier-sediment-dam, or from the melting of glacier ice by a volcanic eruption (Icelandic).

Outwash plain

Water bodies; Glaciers

A broad, low-slope angle alluvial plain composed of glacially eroded, sorted sediment (termed outwash), that has been transported by meltwater. The alluvial plain begins at the foot of a glacier and ...

Rockslide

Water bodies; Glaciers

Several landslides generated by the Great Alaskan Earthquake, Good Friday 1964, fell onto the surface of the so-named glacier in the Chugach Mountains, Alaska.

Bergy seltzer

Water bodies; Glaciers

A crackling or sizzling similar to that made by soft drinks or seltzer water but louder. The sound made as air bubbles formed at many atmospheres of pressure are released during the melting of ...

Lateral moraine

Water bodies; Glaciers

A sediment ridge, located on a glacier's surface adjacent to the valley walls, extending down glacier to the terminus. It forms by the accumulation of rock material falling onto the glacier from the ...

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