Melting and calving are two forms of accumulation.

Glacier Footprints.
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Glacier Footprints
Glaciers leave an impressive footprint on the landscape, carving the rock as they retreat and leaving behind steep topography and fiords where the ice once held sway. Flooded seacoasts and rising water levels are the legacy of their retreats, as are the ecological changes on the landscapes around the glacier's edge. Glaciers also have cultural impacts, in that their activity has affected human settlement, migration, and subsistence over thousands of years.

Inhaltsverzeichnis Show

Glacier accumulation
Formation of glacial ice
Glacier ablation
Equilibrium line altitude
Glaciers as a system
Further reading

The landscape around a glacier clearly illustrates the effects of Pleistocene and Holocene glaciation. Ice excavates the bedrock, forming bowl-shaped cirques, pyramidal horns, and a series of jagged spires called arête ridges that separate glacial valleys. As glaciers carve U-shaped valleys, rocks plucked from the bedrock and frozen in the ice etch grooves and striations in the bedrock. Rocks scoured from surrounding valley walls create dark debris lines called lateral or medial moraines along the edges and down the center of glaciers. Pulverized rock called rock flour, ground by the glacier to a fine powder, escapes with glacial meltwater producing the murky color of glacially fed rivers and lakes. Glacial recession unmasks trimlines, slightly sloping changes in vegetation or weathered bedrock on the valley walls that indicate a glacier's height at its glacial maximum. Meltwater transports glacially eroded material to the outwash plain, an alluvial plain at the edge of retreating glaciers. Icebergs break away or calve from the faces of glaciers ending in lakes or the ocean.

Cracked pieces of rock, plucked or torn from the bedrock, are carried with other debris in and on the glacier. This debris scrapes the valley walls and floors, leaving grooves and striations. Rock debris is crushed and ground into fine grains, called rock flour.

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Glacier accumulation

A glacier is a pile of snow and ice. In cold regions (either towards the poles or at high altitudes), more snow falls (accumulates) than melts (ablates) in the summer season. If the snowpack starts to remain over the summer months, it will gradually build up into a glacier over a period of years.

Unnamed Glacier, Ulu Peninsula, James Ross Island. Small valley glacier.

The key input to a glacier is precipitation. This can be “solid precipitation” (snow, hail, freezing rain) and rain1. Further sources of accumulation can include wind-blown snow, avalanching and hoar frost. These inputs together make up the surface accumulation on a glacier.

The Glacier as a System. Inputs are largely from precipitation, and also from wind-blown snow and avalanches. The glacier loses mass (ablates) mainly by the processes of calving and surface and subaqueous melt. After Cogley et al., 2011.

In general, glaciers receive more mass in their upper reaches and lose more mass in their lower reaches. The part of the glacier that receives more mass by accumulation than it loses by ablation is the accumulation zone.

Heavy snowfall over Monte San Valentín (4058 m asl) and in the accumulation zone of the North Patagonian Icefield. Photo: Murray Foubister Wikimedia Commons.

Formation of glacial ice

Over time, the snowfall (by far the most important input to a glacier) is gradually compressed and compacted by the weight of further snowfall on top it. The beautiful pointy edges of the snowflake gradually lose their tips and shape, becoming first granular ice, then firn, and finally glacial ice.

Layers of ice on Davies Dome Glacier, James Ross Island, Antarctic Peninsula.

The processes of transformation from snow to ice include partial melting, refreezing and fusing. The rate of transformation varies according to climate (temperature and precipitation regimes). The image below is from an ice core. Note the summer and winter layers in the ice. You can also no longer see the individual crystals that make up the glacier ice at this depth.

This 19 cm long of GISP2 ice core from 1855 m depth shows annual layers in the ice. This section contains 11 annual layers with summer layers (arrowed) sandwiched between darker winter layers. From the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Wikimedia Commons.

Glacier ice is a crystalline material, and the crystal size and depth varies with the history of the ice.

Glacier ablation

As ice flows downhill, it either reaches warmer climates, or it reaches the ocean. This causes various processes of melt, or ablation, to occur. In a land-terminating glacier (a glacier that ends on dry land), the main processes of ablation will be surface melt, because air temperatures generally increase as you lose altitude. This meltwater runs off the glacier and forms a number of rivers that typically drain the glacier.

Meltwater stream on Mendenhall Glacier, Alaska. From: Gillfoto, Wikimedia Commons

This surface meltwater may runoff as surface runoff (as shown above; this is a supraglacial meltwater stream on the surface of the glacier), or it may make its way to the bed of the glacier through cracks in the ice (see the figure below). The water at the glacier bed eventually makes it way to the margin of the glacier, where it exits as a meltwater stream.

Meltwater propagates to the glacier bed through crevasses and moulins

Glaciers that reach the sea or terminate in a lake (Marine-terminating and lacustrine-terminating respectively) additionally will calve icebergs and melt underwater. In large parts of Antarctica, melting underneath the base of floating ice shelves and calving from the margin of the glaciers dominate over surface melt.

Upsala Glacier, from the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, terminates in a large lake. Note the calved icebergs drifting out across the lake. Credit: NASA

The lower part of the glacier generally loses more mass from ablation than it receives from accumulation. This part of the glacier is the ablation zone.

Small tidewater (marine-terminating) glaciers calving into Croft Bay, Antarctic Peninsula

Equilibrium line altitude

Most glaciers receive more inputs and accumulation in their upper reaches, and lose more mass by ablation in their lower reaches. The Equilibrium Line Altitude (ELA) marks the area of the glacier separating the accumulation zone from the ablation zone, and were annual accumulation and ablation are equal2.

Equilibrium line altitudes in a hypothetical glacier

Glaciers as a system

Glacier ice is actually a viscous fluid, which flows and deforms under its own weight. Glaciers can therefore be thought of as systems, which receive snow and ice, flow downslope, and melt. Snow and ice are stored in the glacier until they melt as the glacier reaches lower elevations. This concept is explored in more detail in the Introduction to Glacier Mass Balance page and the pages on Glacier Flow.

In the European Alps and North America, most glaciers receive snowfall throughout the winter, and the main glacier ablation occurs in the summer. The Mass Balance, the balance of accumulation and ablation, is usually therefore positive in the winter and negative in the summer3. These glaciers, which receive more snow in winter and less in summer, are known as Winter Accumulation Type Glaciers. These glaciers form the majority of the world’s glaciers4.

In contrast, in places like the Himalaya, the monsoon brings more precipitation in the summer and less in the relatively cold, dry winter. These glaciers therefore receive more accumulation in the summer, and are known as Summer Accumulation Type Glaciers.