Word To Use Today: glacier.

What are glaciers made of?


photo by Paxson Woelber - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50131283

Yes, ice, that's right, well done, but what's the ice is made of? No, it's not actually made from frozen water, but from compressed snow.

Now, if you think of glaciers as smallish things a long way away then consider this: ten percent of the Earth's land surface is covered by glaciers (you don't get them on the sea). Glaciers are so heavy they carve the rock underneath them as they go, and they're the largest source of fresh water on the planet.

Glaciers move slowly, under the force of their own weight - either outwards from a central mass if it's a continental glacier (which contain 99% of glacial ice and form the ice sheets of the polar regions), or down a valley of it's an alpine glacier. Antarctica's 13.2 million square kilometres of continental glacier have an average thickness of 2,100 metres.



So, you know, they may not be next door, but they're still really quite big and important. Aren't they?


photo, Pakistan, by Guilhem Vellut

Word To Use Today: glacier. This word comes from French - from dialect of Savoy, probably - and is derived from the Latin glacia, and before that from glaciēs, ice.

Something that's glacial, by the way, is very slow or very cold. For instance, a glacial look is extremely chilly, and glacial progress nicely describes the course of any government project anywhere in the world.