Glacier Facts

Glaciers move slowly but their sheer weight and size give them enormous power to shape the landscape.
Over tens of thousands of years glaciers carve out winding valleys into huge, straight U-shaped troughs.
Glaciers may truncate (slice off) tributary valleys to leave them ‘hanging, with a cliff edge high above the main valley. Hill spurs (ends of hills) may also be truncated.
Cirques, or corries, are armchair-shaped hollows carved out where a glacier begins high up in the mountains.
Valley glaciers are long, narrow bodies of ice that fill high mountain valleys.
Arétes are knife-edge ridges that are left between several cirques as the glaciers in them cut backwards.
Drift is a blanket of debris deposited by glaciers. Glaciofluvial drift is left by the water made as the ice melts. Till is left by the ice itself.
Drumlins are egg-shaped mounds of till. Eskers are snaking ridges of drift left by streams under the ice.
Moraine is piles of debris left by glaciers.
Proglacial lakes are lakes of glacial meltwater dammed up by moraine.
After an Ice Age, glaciers leave behind a dramatically altered landscape of deep valleys and piles of debris.
After the last Ice Age, water from the huge Lake Agassiz submerged over 500,000 sq km of land near Winnipeg, in North America.

This entry is filed under Interesting Facts.