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Glaciers & Glaciation Quick
Facts |
 QUICK FACTS - Glaciers & Glaciation |
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- A Glacier forms when snow accumulates over time, turns to ice, and begins to flow outwards and downwards under the pressure of its own weight.
- During the last Ice Age, many areas across the world were covered by ice. During its peak, almost 30% of the Earth’s surface, 10 million kmē in North America, 5 million kmē in Europe and 4 million kmē in Siberia were covered by ice.
- Today ice and snow still permanently cover countries within the Arctic Circle, such as Northern Canada, parts of Russia and Greenland.
- The Antarctic ice sheet has been in existence for at least 40 million years.
- Glaciation helped to create many interesting and distinctive landscapes such as the Lake District in the British Isles.
- New space-based study of Antarctica has shown that its ice sheet is shrinking. Satellites were used to plot changes in the Earth's gravity in the Antarctic during the period 2002-2005 and scientists have concluded that the continent is losing 152 cubic km of ice each year, with most loss in the west.
- Many glaciated landscapes are protected from large-scale urban or industrial development as they have been developed as National Parks, where the main surrounding land use is mining or farming.
- Glacial ice often appears blue when it has become very dense. Years of compression gradually make the ice denser, forcing out the tiny air pockets between crystals. When glacier ice becomes extremely dense, the ice absorbs all other colours in the spectrum and reflects primary blue, which is what we see.
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