How do glaciers shape the land?
Ice Sculptor's Mark
How do glaciers shape the land?
You've probably seen mountains with sharp peaks and valleys carved into perfect U-shapes, like someone took a giant scoop to the earth. Who did all that sculpting? Glaciers — rivers of ice so heavy and so slow that they reshape entire landscapes as they crawl.
A glacier starts as snow piling up year after year in a cold place where winter's snowfall never fully melts. The weight of all that snow presses down, squeezing out the air, turning the bottom layers into solid ice. Eventually you've got a slab of ice so thick — sometimes a mile deep — that it starts to flow downhill like extremely slow-motion honey.
