Related topics: climate change · sea level rise · ice · climate · sea level

Giant volcano discovered on Mars

In a groundbreaking announcement at the 55th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference held in The Woodlands, Texas, scientists revealed the discovery of a giant volcano and possible sheet of buried glacier ice in the eastern ...

New data can help better understand glaciers

On February 20, a dedicated team of researchers presented a new high-resolution calving front dataset from 149 glaciers in Svalbard, spanning from 1985 to 2023. This innovative dataset, featured in Earth System Science Data, ...

Underwater unmanned vehicle missing under Doomsday Glacier

The unmanned underwater vehicle Ran has gone missing under a glacier in Antarctica. The vehicle, owned by the University of Gothenburg, is one of just three in the world that is used for research and has contributed to important ...

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Glacier

A glacier is a large mass of ice moving slowly over some land surface or down a valley, formed over long periods from the accumulation of snow in areas where the amount of snow that falls exceeds the amount that melts. The word glacier comes from French via the Vulgar Latin glacia, and ultimately from Latin glacies meaning ice.

Glacier ice is the largest reservoir of fresh water on Earth, and second only to oceans as the largest reservoir of total water. Glaciers cover vast areas of the polar regions and are found in mountain ranges of every continent except Australia, as well as in New Zealand. In the tropics glaciers are restricted to the highest mountains. The processes and landforms caused by glaciers and related to them are referred to as glacial. The process of glacier growth and establishment is called glaciation. Glaciers are sensitive monitors of climate conditions and are crucial to both world water resources and sea level variation.

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