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Glacial Topography

Glacial landform, any product of flowing ice and meltwater. Such landforms are being produced today in glaciated areas, such as Greenland, Antarctica, and many of the world’s higher mountain ranges.

Erosional landforms

Erosional landforms As the glaciers expand, due to their accumulating weight of snow and ice they crush and abrade and scour surfaces such as rocks and bedrock. The resulting erosional landforms include striations, cirques, glacial horns, arêtes, trim lines, U-shaped valleys, roches moutonnées, overdeepenings and hanging valleys.

Cirque: Starting location for mountain glaciers Cirque stairway: a sequence of cirques U-shaped, or trough, valley: U-shaped valleys are created by mountain glaciers. When filled with ocean water so as to create an inlet, these valleys are called fjords. Arête: spiky high land between two glaciers, if the glacial action erodes through, a spillway (or col) forms Valley step: an abrupt change in the longitudinal slope of a glacial valley

Depositional landforms

Depositional landforms Later, when the glaciers retreated leaving behind their freight of crushed rock and sand (glacial drift), they created characteristic depositional landforms. Examples include glacial moraines, eskers, and kames. Drumlins and ribbed moraines are also landforms left behind by retreating glaciers. The stone walls of New England contain many glacial erratics, rocks that were dragged by a glacier many miles from their bedrock origin.

Esker: Built up bed of a subglacial stream. Kame: Irregularly shaped mound. Moraine: Feature can be terminal (at the end of a glacier), lateral (along the sides of a glacier), or medial (formed by the emerger of lateral moraines from contributary glaciers). Outwash fan: Braided stream flowing from the front end of a glacier.