What is a glacier and how does it move?
The Ice River's Crawl
What is a glacier and how does it move?
A glacier is a river made of ice — except it doesn't flow like water. It creeps. It grinds. It takes a hundred years to move as far as you could walk in an afternoon. How does something so solid manage to flow at all?
It starts with snow. Year after year, snow piles up in a cold mountain valley where summer never gets warm enough to melt it all away. The bottom layers get buried under the weight of all that new snow above. Squeezed and squeezed, the fluffy snow crystals collapse into dense, hard ice.
