- Glacier cave
A glacier cave is a
cave formed within theice of aglacier . Glacier caves are often calledice caves , but this term is properly used to describe bedrock caves that contain year-round ice.Most glacier caves are started by water running through or under the glacier. This water often originates on the glacier’s surface through melting, entering the ice at a moulin and exiting at the glacier’s snout at base level. Heat transfer from the water can cause sufficient melting to create an air-filled cavity, sometimes aided bysolifluction . Air movement can then assist enlargement through melting in summer andsublimation in winter.Some glacier caves are formed by geothermal heat from volcanic vents or hotsprings beneath the ice. An extreme example is the
Kverkfjöll glacier cave in theVatnajökull glacier inIceland , measured in the 1980s at 2.8 kilometers long with a vertical range of 525 meters.Some glacier caves are relatively unstable due to melting and
glacial motion , and are subject to localized or complete collapse, as well as elimination byglacial retreat . An example of the dynamic nature of glacier caves may be seen in theParadise Ice Caves located onMt. Rainier in theUnited States . Known since the early 1900s, the caves were thought to have disappeared altogether in the mid-1940s, yet in 1978 cavers measured 13.25 km of passageways in glacier caves there, and it was considered the longest glacier cave system in the world. The Paradise Ice Caves collapsed and vanished in the 1990s, and the lower lobe of the glacier which once contained the caves also vanished entirely between 2004 and 2006.Glacier caves may be used by
glaciologist s to study the interior of glaciers. The study of glacier caves themselves is sometimes called glaciospeleology.References
* W. R. Halliday, "Glaciospeleology" Cave Science Topics, Caving International no. 4, July 1979.
* J.Schroeder, "Inside the Glaciers – Svalbard, Norway " The Canadian Caver vol.22 no.1, 1990.
* [http://glaciercaves.com/html/glacie_12.htm Glacier Caves website]
* [http://perso.orange.fr/04as/listspel/mondial/pseudok/glace.htm List of Longest and Deepest Glacier Caves and Moulins] (in French)
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