Glacial Deposition Landforms
Drag your skis or boots across the surface of the snow and you will move some snow from one place to another. The materials that glaciers move are likewise deposited in new locations, and they create distinct landforms as they do so. Click through the images below to learn about some of the landforms created when glaciers retreat (ablate) and deposit materials.
- A glacial moraine is any accumulation of glacial debris, such as soil and rocks, that has been dragged along by a glacier. The glacial debris that makes up a moraine is specifically called till. This glacial till may have been plucked off the valley floor as the glacier advanced, or it may have fallen off the valley walls as a result of weathering and erosion.
- Eskers are long, winding ridges of sand and gravel. The sediments that make up eskers come from streams of liquid water that make their way through ice-walled tunnels and cracks in a glacier. In this picture, the esker is the long ridge running along the left side of the tree.
- A kame is an irregularly shaped hill or mound made of glacial till. It forms when a melting glacier makes a depression in the landscape, later leaving behind an assortment of sediments when it has completely melted.
- Drumlins are long, tear-shaped sedimentary landforms created when glaciers melt. They have a high, blunt end on one side, and a long, tapered end on the other side. The long, gently tapered end of a drumlin forms parallel to the direction of ice movement. The blunter and higher end (the end on the left in this picture) is the direction the glacier came from. The gentle slope (the right side in this picture) is the direction the glacier advanced.
- Erratics are large pieces of rock carried by glacial ice, often for hundreds of kilometers, before being dropped or deposited.
- Kettle lakes are shallow sediment-filled bodies of water left behind by glacial meltwater.
