Thawed Glacier
by Jeremy and Matthew
When a glacier has melted, there are heaps of different things that the glacier has produced that are left behind.

It produces things like lakes, horns, cols, waterfalls, snowfed streams, U shaped valleys, morraine, tarns, cirques and hanging valleys.

There are two main types of erosion going on at the bottom of a glacier. Big bits of rock are picked up by the glacier and mixed into the ice.  This rocky ice is moved along by the glacier and it acts like big, rough sandpaper scraping away the base and side of the valley.  This is called scouring.  One of the things caused by scouring is striations which are long grooves cut into the rock.

A hanging valley is made when a smaller glacier used to feed into the bigger glacier.  The little glacier's valley now has a river in it which turns into a waterfall  falling into the bigger valley.

Moraine is the  piles of rock that the glacier used to carry with it.  When the glacier melts the rocks are left behind.

When the cirque that the glacier started from fills with water instead of ice, it turns into a cirque lake.  When the top of a mountain had a few glaciers starting from different sides, then a horn is made.  The Matterhorn in Switzerland is an example of this.

There are not many examples of glacial landforms in Australia because it does not have many parts that were very cold. 

Click HERE to see our model of a thawed glacial landscape.