The outlet glaciers of the Greenland Ice Sheet are receding, calving more icebergs, and flowing faster. Further in land, the ice sheet is thinning, and there is more surface melt. The Greenland Ice Sheet is drained by outlet glaciers that flow through deep fjords to the ocean. In the image below, you can see an …
Glacier recession around the Greenland Ice Sheet Read More »
By Neil McDonald, Stirling University What is an ice tongue? Ice tongues are simply floating platforms of ice which are attached to the front of marine-terminating glaciers and extend into the sea. Ice tongues differ from ice shelves as they are confined by valley walls and have a narrow width relative to their length, hence …
The Greenland Ice Sheet is the world’s second ice sheet. It lies in the Northern Hemisphere. It is quite different to Antarctica in character. It has enough ice to raise global sea levels by about 7.4 m on full melting (Morlighein et al., 2018). Like Antarctica, its ocean-terminating outlet glaciers are vulnerable to ocean heating. …
What is a Tidewater Glacier? Tidewater glaciers are glaciers which extend out, and terminate into the sea [1]. They are part of a group of glaciers known as calving glaciers, as their main method of ice loss is through iceberg calving, instead of surface melt [1,2]. Calving icebergs currently accounts for up to 70% of …
What is a grounding line? Almost all of Antarctica is covered in ice. Less than 1% its land area is ice free. This means that, across Antarctica, almost all glaciers end in the ocean, whereupon they calve icebergs. These glaciers can be grounded, or can end in floating ice tongues or larger ice shelves. These …
This section of the website focuses on Process Glaciology; that is, the processes by which glaciers grow and form, flow, and move. We focus on the ‘nuts and bolts’ of glacier processes, such as glacier mass balance, glacier flow, and the structures in the ice that these processes causem such as crevasses, as well as …
