Presented By: Moises Malone R.

Montealegre
What is glaciers?
 Glaciers are important agents of erosion of bedrock
and mechanisms of transport of detritus in mountain
regions
 Glacier is a slowly moving mass or river of ice formed
by the accumulation and compaction of snow on
mountain or near the poles
 Where glacial processes which bring sediment into the
marine environment generate deposits that have a
much higher chance of long-term preservation, and
recognition of the characteristics of these sediments
can provide important clues about past climates
Glacier Perito Moreno in
Argentina
Did you know?
 That glacier ice is the largest reservoir of fresh water on the
planet, storing an estimated 75 percent of the world’s
supply
 That Alaska is estimated to have more than 100,000
glaciers  Most remain unnamed
 That U.S. Geological Survey estimates that if all of the
world’s glaciers melted, sea level would rise by more than
80 meters (260 feet)
 What makes glaciers unique is their ability to move. Due to
sheer mass, glaciers flow like very slow rivers
 Glaciers are so powerful they can change the shape of
mountain valleys. As a glacier flows down a valley it wears
away the rock and changes it from a typical V-shape,
created by river erosion, to a U-shape. This characteristic
U-shape makes it easy to spot ancient glacial valleys.
There are two types of terrain:
a) Temperate or mountain glaciers –
form in areas of relatively high altitude where precipitation in the
winter is mainly in the form of snow

a) Polar glaciers - occur at the north and south poles, which are
regions of low precipitation
 Temperate or mountain glaciers
Two zones in mountain glaciers:
Accumulation zone -the weight of snow accumulating
in the upper part of the glacier causes it to move
downslope, where it reaches lower altitudes and higher
temperatures

Ablation zone - the lower part of the glacier where the

glacier melts during the summer
Glacial advance is the precipitation adds more mass to
a glacier than melting and sublimation remove, the
total volume of the glacier increases. As a result, the
glacier grows, extending farther down the valley than
it did previously

Glacial retreat is when glaciers melt faster than they are

replenished by precipitation, the total volume
decreases. The glacier shrinks
 Mountain glaciers do not usually reach sea level in
temperate areas, except in places where there is high
precipitation, which adds a lot of material at the head
of the glacier: these glaciers move rapidy downslope
and loss may be both by melting and calving of
icebergs into the sea
 Polar glaciers
Permanent ice in the polar
continental areas forms:
Ice sheets - a chunk of glacier ice that covers the land
surrounding it and is greater than 50,000 kilometers
(20,000 miles) wide. Example of it is the Greenland ice
sheet that is a vast body of ice covering 1,710,000
square kilometers , roughly 80% of the surface of
Greenland which is the second largest ice body in the
world, after the Antarctic ice sheet.
Ice caps – basically a continental glacier. They are
typically a large expanse of snow covered ice that feeds
a collection of glaciers around their perimeter
Nunatak is an isolated mountain peak that once projected
through a continental ice sheet or an Alpine-type ice cap

The nunatak
Ulvetanna in
Antarctica
Ice shelves - areas of floating ice extending out into the
shallow marine realm
Ice berg – Where ice breaks up from ice shelves to form
floating masses which drift in the ocean currents and
wind for hundreds or thousands of kilometres before
completely melting

Ice shelve in
Antartica
 Glacial Ice
 Ice is a solid, but under pressure it will behave in a
ductile manner and flow by moving away from the
point of higher pressure.
 Glacier ice moves at rates which vary from as little as a
few metres per year to hundreds of metres a year.
 Pressure is provided by the weight of ice above any
particular point and the ice will flow slowly as an
extremely viscous fluid
 Thermal regimes of glaciers
 Cold glaciers - move entirely by internal deformation,
with the upper layers of the ice body shearing over the
lower parts.
 Material carried by cold glaciers is largely detritus that has
fallen under gravity down the upper part of the valley sides and
comes to rest on the top of the glacier
 Thermal regimes of glaciers
 Polythermal glacier are cold-based most of the time,
but as snow and ice accumulate in the upper part of
the glacier, the pressure near the base of it increases to
the point where it melts
 A thermally complex glacierwith both warm and cold ice.
Typically, warm ice occurs where the ice is thickest as a
result of geothermal heating, whilst the snout and margins
of the glacier are frozen to the bed.
 Will caused a glacial surge as the body of ice moves by basal
sliding rapidly downslope and during this phase the glacier
is capable of eroding bedrock
 Thermal regimes of glaciers
 Temperate glacier is at melting point throughout the
year, from its surface to its base. The ice of a
polar glacier is always below the freezing point from
the surface to its base, although the surface snowpack
may experience seasonal melting.
 typical of mountainous regions in lower latitudes.
 The action of temperate glaciers provides an
important source of detritus that is carried
downstream by rivers to supply other depositional
environments.
Thermal regimes of glaciers
 Glaciers
 Cirque glacier is formed in a cirque, a bowl-shaped
depression on the side of or near mountains. Snow and ice
accumulation in corries often occurs as the result of
avalanching from higher surrounding slopes.
 Valley glacier - are streams of flowing ice that are
confined within steep walled valleys, often following the
course of an ancient river valley.
 Piedmont glacier - occur when steep valleyglaciers spill
into relatively flat plains, where they spread out into bulb-
like lobes.
 where valley glaciers may merge and spread out as a body of ice
hundreds of metres thick.
 Cirque Glacier

The Fraser valley glacier in

National Park, Alaska

piedmont glacier, Quttinirpaaq

National Park, Ellesmere Island
 Erosional glacial features
 The geomorphological features associated with the
glaciations of the past few hundred thousand years are
largely found in upland areas and therefore will not be
preserved in the geological record: cirques, U-shaped
valleys and hanging valleys are evidence of past glaciation,
which, in the framework of geological time, are ephemeral,
lasting only until they are themselves eroded away.
 Pieces of bedrock incorporated into a glacier by plucking
may retain striae, and contact between clasts within the ice
also results in scratch marks on the surfaces of sand and
gravel transported and deposited by ice.
 Transport by continental glaciers
Debris is incorporated into a moving ice mass by two
main mechanisms:
1. Supraglacial debris -which accumulates on the
surface of a glacier as a result of detritus falling down
the sides of the glacial valley.
 dominantly coarser-grained material with a low
proportion of fine-grained sediment.
2. Basal debris - which is entrained by processes of
abrasion and plucking from bedrock by moving ice.
 has a wider range of grain sizes, including fine-
grained rock flour produced by abrasion processes.
Deposition by continental glaciers
Till - the general term for all deposits directly deposited
by ice
 tillite if it is lithified
 Diamicton – unlithified deposits of poorly sorted
material in an objective way
 Diamictite - lithified deposits of poorly sorted material
in an objective way
Tills is divided by numbers of
different types depending on their
origin:
1. Meltout tills are deposited by melting ice as
accumulations of material at a glacier front
2. Lodgement tills are formed by the plastering of
debris at the base of a moving glacier, and the
shearing process during the ice movement may
result in a flow-parallel clast orientation fabric.
3. Basal tills are collectively meltout and lodgement
tills
4. Flow tills are accumulations of glacial sediment
reworked by gravity flows
 Characteristics of glacially
transported material
 Glacial erosion processes result in a wide range of sizes
of detrital particles
 Glacially transported debris is typically very poorly
sorted because the ice movement is a laminar flow
there is no opportunity for different parts of the ice
body to mix and hence no sorting of material carried
by the glacier will take place
 Fragments plucked by the ice will be angular and
debris carried within ice will not undergo any further
abrasion, and only material on the top of an ice body
will be subject to weathering processes
 debris carried by glaciers is very angular and the
overall texture is therefore very immature
 the mineral composition of the deposit may be very
similar to that of the bedrock and unaltered lithic
fragments are commo
 The fine-grained rock flour formed by glacial abrasion
is different in composition to similar grade sediment
produced by other mechanisms of weathering and
erosionn
 high proportion of suspended sediment gives the
characteristic green to white colour to lakes fed by
glacial melt waters
 CONTINENTAL GLACIAL
DEPOSITION
 Modern landscapes formerly covered by Quaternary ice
sheets display a wide variety of depositional landforms
 many of the modern glacial landscapes are undergoing
erosion and over time the continental glacial deposits will
be reworked and removed
 Glacial deposits recognized in pre-Quaternary strata are
mostly marine in origin
 The reason that the surfaces often seem so well coated in
moraine are two fold.
 Firstly, the surface is the obvious place for debris from the valley
walls to accumulate, and secondly, the surface is subjected to
insolation and melting.
 Moraines
Moraine - Accumulations of till formed directly at the
margins of a glacier
Several different types of moraine:
Terminal or end moraines - mark the limit of glacial
advance and are typically ridges that lie across the valley
Push moraines - are formed where a glacier front acts as a
bulldozer scraping sediment from the valley floor and
piling it up at the glacier front
Dump moraines - form at the snout of the glacier where the
melting of the ice keeps pace with glacial advance
 Moraines
lateral moraine - If a glacier retreats the melting releases
the detritus that has accumulated at the sides of the glacier
where it is deposited  Lateral moraines form ridges along
the sides of glaciated valleys, parallel to the valley walls
where two glaciers in tributary valleys converge detritus
from the sides of each is trapped in the centre of the
amalgamated glacier
medial moraine - is a ridge of moraine that runs down the
center of a valley floor. It forms when two glaciers meet and
the debris on the edges of the adjacent valley sides join and
are carried on top of the enlarged glacier.
ice-cored moraines (ablation moraines) give the
impression of being much larger volumes of detritus than
they really are because most of their bulk is made up of ice.
 Other glacial landforms
ribbed moraines – are known to be lodgement tills deposited
beneath a glacier may form sheets that can be tens of metres
thick, or show irregular ridges
Drumlins - tills also form smoothed mounds which are oval-
shaped hills tens of metres high and hundreds of metres to
kilometres long, with the elongation in the direction of ice flow
Eskers – known as the deposits of the rivers form sinuous ridges of
material in temperate glaciers partial melting of the ice results in
rivers flowing in tunnels within or beneath the ice, carrying with
them any detritus held by the ice that melted
Kames and kame terraces - are mounds or ridges of sediment
formed by the collapse of crevasse fills, sediment formed in lakes
lying on the top of the glacier or the products of the collapse of
the edge of a glacier.
 Outwash plains
 The large volumes of water and detritus associated with the melting of
a glacier mean that the outwash plain is a very active region with river
channels depositing sediment rapidly to form a thick, extensive braid
plain deposit
outwash plain - also called a sandur, sandr or sandar, is a plain formed of
glacial sediments deposited by meltwater outwash at the terminus of a
glacier. As it flows, the glacier grinds the underlying rock surface and
carries the debris along.
-Outwash plain deposits can be distinguished from other braided river
deposits by their association with other glacial features such as
moraines
jo¨kulhlaups - The most spectacular events associated with glacial
sedimentation are sudden glacial outburst events
 The outburst can be either the result of the failure of a natural dam
holding back a lake at the front of the glacier or a consequence of
melting associated with a subglacial volcanic eruption.
 Outwash plains
 The absence of widespread vegetation under the cold
climatic conditions means that fine-grained sediment
on the outwash plain remains exposed and is subject
to aeolian reworking
 Clasts exposed on the outwash plain may be abraded
by wind-blown sediment to form ventifacts
 Periglacial areas
Periglacial zone - the areas that lie adjacent to ice
masses in Polar region
Permafrost –the region created in periglacial area that
the temperature is below zero for much of the year and
the ground is largely frozen
 Other features of regions of permafrost:
 patterned ground - which is composed of polygons of
gravelly deposits formed by repeated freezing and
thawing of the upper mobile layer
 ice wedges - which are cracks in the ground formed by
ice that subsequently become filled with sediment
MARINE GLACIAL ENVIRONMENTS
 ice shelves partially act to buffer the seaward flow of
continental ice: melting of the floating ice of an ice
shelf does not add any volume to the oceans, but if
they are removed then more continental ice will flow
into the sea and this w
 Ice shelves break up at the edges to form icebergs and
melt at the base in contact with seawater. Ice in a
marine setting also occurs where temperate or
poythermal valley glaciers flow down to sea level
tidewater glaciers - can contain large amounts of
both supraglacial and basal debris

Sea ice - is frozen seawater and does not contain any

sedimentary material except for wind-blown dust
Erosional features associated with
marine glaciers
 Where continental ice from an ice sheet or valley glacier
reaches the shoreline of a shallow shelf the ice may be
grounded on the sea floor
 The movement of the ice mass and drifting icebergs may
locally scour the sea floor, resulting in grooves in soft
sediment that may be metres deep and hundreds of metres
long
 Meltwater flowing subglacially may be under considerable
pressure and can erode channels into the seafloor sediment
beneath the ice, forming tunnel valleys that subsequently
may be filled with deposits from the flowing water
 Marine glacial deposits
 glaciomarine sediment - High latitude, deep-ocean
sediment, which originated in glaciated land areas and
has been transported to the oceans by glaciers or
icebergs. Such sediments may contain large
dropstones, transported by and dropped from
icebergs, in the midst of fine-grained sediments
 The detritus released from the bottom of an ice shelf
forms till sheets which may be thick and extensive
beneath a long-lived shelf
 Icebergs formed at the front of tidewater glaciers are
generally small, but may be laden with sediment
 As an iceberg melts, this debris will gradually be
released and deposited as dropstones in open marine
sediments
 (Dropstones are isolated fragments of rock found
within finer-grained water-deposited sedimentary
rocks. They range in size from small pebbles to
boulders)
 DISTRIBUTION OF GLACIAL
DEPOSITS
 Quaternary valley and piedmont glaciers form distinctive
moraines but are largely confined to upland areas that are
presently undergoing erosion.
 In these upland areas glacial and periglacial deposits such as
moraines, eskers, kames, and so on have a very poor preservation
potential in the long term.
 During the glacial episodes of the Quaternary the polar ice caps
extended further into lower latitudes.
 The sea level was lower during glacial periods and many parts of
the continental shelves were under iceUpland glacial regions
were also more extensive, with ice reaching beyond the
immediate vicinity of the mountain glaciers. The growth of polar
ice caps is known to be related to global changes in climate, with
the ice at its most extensive when the globe was several degrees
cooler.
 Glaciation and global climate
 Evidence from the distribution of glacial sediments
and sedimentary rocks indicates that there have been a
number of periods during Earth history when the
polar ice caps covered much larger areas than at
present.
 Glacial rebound – isostasy
 During periods of glaciation the ice layer on the
continents may be hundreds to thousands of metres
thick.
 The rate of melting is typically much faster than the
isostatic uplift and consequently the crust continues to
go up for thousands of years after the ice has melted 
The effects of this so called glacial rebound
raised beaches provide evidence of the position of the
land relative to the sea thousands of years ago, prior to
uplift of the land.
CHARACTERISTICS OF GLACIAL DEPOSITS
Lithologies conglomerate, sandstone and mudstone

Mineralogy variable, compositionally immature

Texture extremely poorly sorted in till to poorly

sorted in fluvio-glacial facies
Bed Geometry bedding absent to indistinct in many
continental deposits, glaciomarine deposits
may be laminated
Sediment Structures usually none in tills, crossbedding in fluvio-
glacial facies
Paleocurrents orientation of clasts can indicate ice flow
direction
Fossils normally absent in continental deposits, may
be present in glaciomarine facies

Colour variable, but deposits are not usually oxidised

Facies associations may be associated with fluvial facies or with

shallow-marine deposits