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The scientific agency of the United States Department of the Interior, USGS's mission is to provide information to describe and understand the earth, its natural resources, and the natural hazards that threaten it.
A sand and gravel deposit formed by running water on stagnant or moving-glacier ice. Crevasse fills or crevasse ridges form within crevasses. Kames form on flat or inclined ice, in holes, or in cracks. A kame terrace forms between the glacier and the adjacent land surface. Shapes include hills, mounds, knobs, hummocks, or ridges.
Industry:Water bodies
A general term for unstratified and unsorted deposits of sediment that form through the direct action of, or contact with, glacier ice. Many different varieties are recognized on the basis of their position with respect to a glacier.
Industry:Water bodies
A glacial spring, generally discharging supercooled water with a significant hydrostatic head.
Industry:Water bodies
A bowl-shaped, amphitheater-like depression eroded into the head or the side of a glacier valley. Typically, a cirque has a lip at its lower end. The term is French and is derived from the Latin word circus.
Industry:Water bodies
A depression in an outwash plain by the melting of a block of ice floated to its depositional site by meltwater and subsequently buried by sediment. As it melts, a depression in the surface of the outwash plain develops.
Industry:Water bodies
A crack or series of cracks that open in the surface of a moving glacier in response to differential stresses caused by glacier flow. They range in shape from linear to arcuate, in length from feet to miles. Their orientation may be in any direction with respect to the glacier flow. The deepest crevasses may exceed 100 feet.
Industry:Water bodies
A mono-mineralic type of rock, composed of crystals of the mineral ice, formed through metamorphism of snowflakes. Metamorphism results in recrystallization, increased density, and the growth of hexagonal crystals. This ice comprises the majority of the mass of a glacier. Intermediate stages include firn and neve.
Industry:Water bodies
A varve is a pair of sedimentary layers, a couplet, that form in an annual cycle as the result of seasonal weather changes. Typically formed in glacial lakes a varve couplet consists of a coarser grained summer layer formed during open-water conditions, and a finer grained winter layer formed from deposition from suspension during a period of winter ice cover. Many varve deposits contain hundreds of couplets.
Industry:Water bodies
An unsorted and unstratified accumulation of glacial sediment, deposited directly by glacier ice. Till is a heterogeneous mixture of different sized material deposited by moving ice (lodgement till) or by the melting in-place of stagnant ice (ablation till). After deposition, some tills are reworked by water.
Industry:Water bodies
An irregular-shaped layer or pile of glacier sediment formed by the melting of a block of stagnant ice. Ultimately, ablationa moraine is deposited on the former bed of the glacier.
Industry:Water bodies
