04/08/2026
Ancient ice 🧊🏔
Sharing some facts about glaciers I’ve learned over the years:
1. Because glacial ice is so dense and compact, it often appears a blue colour. This is because ‘blue’ is the only color that glacial ice can’t absorb. In contrast to red and yellow light waves, blue light can pe*****te snow and ice, which then creates that cool shade of blue.
2. Glaciers are like rivers in which they are always moving and shifting.
3. Due to the deposition and compaction of layers of well-formed snowflakes, glacier ice has a much more consistent structure than frozen water, making it technically a form of rock similar to limestone.
4. The Antarctic ice sheet is actually a glacier and has existed for at least 40 million years. If it were to melt in its entirety, sea levels would rise 210 feet worldwide, according to the U.S. Geological Service.
5. A single glacier ice crystal can grow to be as large as a baseball.
6. Glaciers form the largest reservoir of fresh water on the planet. In fact, they store 75% of the world’s fresh water!
7. The Siachen Glacier in the Karakoram mountain ranges of the Himalayas is knownn as the the second longest non polar glacier in the world at 76km long and it’s the worlds highest and coldest battlefield.
8. There are two types of glaciers; the first is the alpine glacier which form on mountains, and the second is the continental glacier which are large ice sheets that cover a vast area such as Greenland or Antarctica.
9. Glaciers pick up things like rocks and move them in a process called deposition which is when a glacier moves it scratches the earths surface picking up boulders and rocks as big as a house becoming stuck in the glacier and once the glacier melts they are left behind in a new location further away. Think of those moraines you see at the near the toe of glaciers like Athabasca glacier.
10. Not all glaciers reach the valley or ocean floor, hanging glaciers stop partway down a mountain cliff often making the area beneath them at risk due to icefalls and avalanches.
What fact are you surprised by? Do you have any other facts?
