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Encyclopedia entry: glaciers and glaciology
- Article from:
- The Oxford Companion to the Earth
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Copyright© The Oxford Companion to the Earth 2000, originally published by Oxford University Press 2000. (Hide copyright information)
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glaciers and glaciology
A glacier will form whenever a body of snow accumulates, compacts, and turns to ice. If large enough, this body of ice will flow, thus forming a glacier. Glaciology is the study of glaciers. Glaciers range in size from small valley glaciers, such as those in the European Alps, to large ice sheets, such as that in Antarctica which today contains 91 per cent of all the glacier ice on Earth. In the past, during the Quaternary Ice Age, large ice sheets covered much of northern Europe and North America and the landscape of these regions is dominated by glacial landforms and glacial sediments.
Glaciers can be classified in terms of a combination of topography and size. ...