How Do Glacier Form

A glacier is a slowly flowing mass of ice with incredible erosive capabilities. Valley
glaciers (alpine glaciers, mountain glaciers) excel at sculpting mountains into jagged ridges,
peaks, and deep U-shaped valleys as these highly erosive rivers of ice progress down
mountainous slopes. Valley glaciers are currently active in Scandinavia, the Alps, the
Himalayas, and in the mountains and volcanoes along the west coasts of North and South
America. The amazing, jagged landscape of New Zealands Southern Alps is also courtesy of
the erosive power of glaciers.
Continental glaciers (ice sheets, ice caps) are massive sheets of glacial ice that cover
landmasses. Continental glaciers are currently eroding deeply into the bedrock of Antarctica
and Greenland. The vast ice sheets are incredibly thick and have thus depressed the surface of
the land below sea level in many locations. For example, in West Antarctica the maximum ice
thickness is 4.36 kilometers causing the land surface to become depressed 2.54 kilometers
below sea level! If all the glacial ice on Antarctica were to melt instantaneously, all that
would be visible of Antarcticas land surface would be large and small landmasses with
scattered islands surrounded by the Southern Ocean.
A considerable amount of snow accumulation is necessary for glacial ice to form. It is
imperative that more snow accumulates in the winter than that which melts away during the
summer. Snowflakes are hexagonal crystals of frozen water; however, layers of fluffy
snowflakes are not glacial icenot yet at least.
As thick layers of snow accumulate, the deeply buried snowflakes become
increasingly more tightly packed together. The dense packing causes the snowflakes to take
on rounded shapes as the hexagonal snowflake shape is destroyed. With enough time, the
deeply buried, well-rounded grains become very densely packed, expelling most of the air
trapped between the grains. The granular snow grains are called firn and take approximately
two years to form.
The thick, overlying snowpack exerts tremendous pressure onto the layers of buried
firn, and these grains begin to melt a tiny bit. The firn and meltwater slowly recrystallize,
forming glacial ice. This transformation process may take several decades to hundreds of
years because the rate of glacial ice formation is highly dependent upon the amount of
snowfall.