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

Mars has belts of glaciers consisting of frozen water

Mars has distinct polar ice caps, but Mars also has belts of glaciers at its central latitudes in both the southern and northern hemispheres. A thick layer of dust covers the glaciers, so they appear as surface of the ground, ...

Warming Greenland ice sheet passes point of no return

Nearly 40 years of satellite data from Greenland shows that glaciers on the island have shrunk so much that even if global warming were to stop today, the ice sheet would continue shrinking.

Are we missing a crucial component of sea-level rise?

Recent efforts using computational modeling to understand how melting ice in Antarctica will impact the planet's oceans have focused on ice-sheet geometry, fracture, and surface melting—processes that could potentially ...

Video: Melting glaciers

Glaciers across the globe have lost over nine trillion tons of ice in half a century. How will glaciers look over the coming decades? "It all depends on what humans are doing now in terms of greenhouse gas emissions:" this ...

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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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