What role do glaciers play in human life? Geographical significance of glaciers

I suddenly had a chance to remember glaciers in the tenth grade, when preparation for the Unified State Exam came first. The question turned out to be tricky, and I had to pull out almost all the ins and outs. It turned out that glaciers are a very important thing, not only in ecosystems, but also for our entire beautiful blue planet.

What is a glacier

A glacier is a mass of ice, mostly of atmospheric origin. It can take the form of a stream, a dome, a floating slab depending on environmental factors. Glaciers form as a result of large accumulations of snow that fall and do not melt for many years.

The importance of glaciers in nature

Glaciers are important for:

Read more about heat balance and glaciers

Over time, the amount of solar heat falling on the surface of the planet should, in theory, fall: the Sun is slowly but surely using up energy resources. But ever since a person began to do something, well, build factories, etc., the amount of heat released into the atmosphere has been growing, and is growing, if not every year, then with every century. To prevent the planet from turning into a greenhouse, and the surface temperature from rising to a catastrophic thirty-plus degrees, the planet needs natural sources of cold. That's why so much research is now aimed at preserving and restoring glaciers.

Conditions for the existence of glaciers

From the above it follows that the main conditions for the preservation of glaciers are constant low temperature and a large amount of snowfall. There are mountain glaciers - peaks, slopes, valleys; mountain cover and integumentary, depending on location.

What role do glaciers play in nature? and got the best answer

Answer from Roller.[guru]
Modern glaciers cover an area of ​​over 16 million km², or about 11% of the land. They contain more than 25 million km³ of ice - almost two-thirds of the volume of fresh water on the planet.

Answer from 2 answers[guru]

Hello! Here is a selection of topics with answers to your question: What role do glaciers play in nature?

Answer from Victoria Aleksandrovna Babushkina[guru]

Answer from Alexandr borodach[newbie]
Modern glaciers cover an area of ​​over 16 million km2, or about 11% of the land. Do they contain more than 25 million km? ice - almost two-thirds of the volume of fresh water on the planet.
The work of a glacier can be either destructive (denudation) or cumulative (accumulative). At the same time, the glacier also transports all the material that falls into it. The denudation activity of a glacier consists of processing and deepening natural depressions in the relief. The accumulative work of a glacier occurs in the glacier's feeding area, where snow accumulates and turns into ice. Thanks to the accumulative work of the glacier in the area of ​​its melting, the moraine deposited by it creates unique relief forms. Areas where mountain glaciers exist are characterized by the phenomenon of snow avalanches. Thanks to them, the glacial areas are unloaded. An avalanche is a collapse of snow that slides down mountain slopes and carries snow masses along its path. Avalanches can occur on slopes steeper than 15°. The causes of avalanches are different: the looseness of the snow in the first time after it falls; increase in temperature in the lower horizons of snow due to pressure, thaw. In any case, an avalanche has enormous destructive power. The impact power in them reaches 100 tons per 1 m2. The impetus for the start of a snowfall can be the most insignificant imbalance of the hanging snow masses: a sharp cry, a weapon shot. In avalanche-prone areas, work is underway to prevent and remove avalanches. Avalanches are most common in the Alps (they are called here “white destruction” - they can destroy an entire village), the Cordillera, and the Caucasus.
Glaciers play a big role not only in nature, but also in human life. This is the greatest repository of fresh water, so necessary for man.

The significance of glaciers in the life of the landscape shell is extremely diverse.

First of all, we have to take into account the indisputable fact that the existence of areas of glaciation determines the existence on Earth of very characteristic geographical landscapes, grouped into entire landscape polar zones of “eternal ice” or “eternal frost” (the island Arctic and all of Antarctica). These landscape zones also have their own similarity in the phenomena of vertical zonality in temperate and even tropical latitudes in the form of high-mountain glacial landscapes.

Having arisen in certain climatic conditions and developing into complex formations, glaciers change the climate during their evolution. It can be assumed that the growth of glaciers at first changes the climate in a direction that promotes further intensification of glaciation, because an increase in the area of ​​ice should lower the snow limit, as if attracting it to the earth’s surface, and thereby expand the area of ​​snow accumulation, which, in turn, , leads to further growth of glaciers. However, this expansion of glaciers has two consequences: climate cooling and climate drying. When the ice sheet reaches a certain size (according to Brooks, with a diameter of 1100-1600 km), the changes in climatic conditions caused by it acquire a direction unfavorable for glaciation: an anticyclonic state of the atmosphere is established above the sheet. Since the air movement in an anticyclone is centrifugal, moisture-saturated air currents in the lower layers of the atmosphere are repelled from the glaciation area, and feeding can occur mainly due to downward air currents in the center of the anticyclone. In addition, due to dry air, ice loss through evaporation increases. The simultaneous weakening of nutrition and increased ablation results in a stop in the further development of the ice sheet.

Advancing glaciers destroy vegetation, bury soils, stopping the soil-forming process and forcing it to develop on a new basis after the disappearance of ice, displace the animal world, redistribute the habitats of animals and plants, fill shallow seas, create new, sometimes huge, lake-type reservoirs upon withdrawal, and change the direction of river flow, blocking their path and forcing them to flow along the edge of continental ice.

The movement of ice from the feeding areas to the drainage area is at the same time the transformation of moisture, conserved and long-preserved in solid form, into a more mobile (liquid) and geomorphologically more active state. For many modern rivers, glacier meltwater serves as the main source of nutrition.

During its movement, the glacier transports rock fragments located in different parts of the glacial body from high to lower levels. This process, similar to the process of unloading mountains from mineral material by rivers, serves as a prerequisite for the transformation of the earth's surface by glaciers through its destruction and the creation of special relief forms and a unique group of continental rocks.

All mineral material, from large stone blocks weighing tens and hundreds of tons to the smallest dust, that gets into the body of a glacier and moves along with the ice is called moraine. Moraines participating in the movement of the glacier are classified as moving, and those that have already stopped moving are classified as deferred; Every moraine deposited necessarily goes through the Moving stage.

The glacier carries all the moraine material to its end (and ice sheets, characterized by the radial spreading of ice from the center, to their edge) and, due to the melting of the ice, is deposited here in the form of a shaft of the final, or frontal, moraine. With the disappearance of the glacier or most of it, all moraines will be projected onto the glacier bed. Mineral fragments that covered the surface of the glacier in the form of a cloak, moraine material located inside the glacier, as well as at its base, after the melting of the glacier, form either a smooth or irregularly lumpy cover of the main moraine.

The main moraine of former continental glaciers covers millions of square kilometers in North America, Europe and Asia, creating distinctive landscapes here. The relief created by glacial accumulation is characterized by an alternation of hills with closed (drainless) depressions, often occupied by lakes or swamps: the isolation of negative forms of relief and the water resistance of the moraine material itself (usually consisting of boulder clay or loam, with randomly included angularly rounded large or small stones) contribute to both waterlogging and the formation of lake reservoirs.

Ablation processes that transform ice into water help spread the glacier's influence far beyond the area it occupies. In this regard, the work of the glacier should, to a certain extent, also include the work of the meltwater flowing from it. Although the latter is not fundamentally different from the work of rivers that do not flow from glaciers, nevertheless, layered sediments resulting from the erosion, sorting and redeposition of non-layered moraine accumulations by glacial waters are usually classified as a special group of fluvioglacial (i.e., glacial-fluvial) sediments. sediments. Glacier meltwater accumulates in front of frontal or marginal moraines in vast flat fields of pebbles or sand, called outwash; fine glacial turbidity is carried out and deposited even further from the glacier.

Very peculiar manifestations of the work of fluvioglacial flows, carried out with the participation of ice, include eskers - narrow hills, sometimes winding, composed of sand and pebble layered material and similar to railway embankments. Elevated above the surrounding terrain by 25-70 m, they stretch for several hundred meters, or even tens of kilometers. In some places the shafts branch, give off lateral branches, and in others they clearly expand, i.e., sometimes in plan they resemble a river with tributaries flowing through a series of lakes. According to most theories, eskers represent deposits of glacial waters within or at the very end of a glacial body.

Isolated hills or irregular groups of hills, composed, like eskers, of layered material (but usually thinner and clayey) are called kamas. They are often associated with eskers, constituting the clearly-shaped extensions of the latter mentioned by us, or they develop independently of eskers. Some authors consider kame sediments as deposits of small lakes formed among masses of dead ice, i.e., as glaciolacustrine deposits.

Other glacial-lacustrine deposits are also closely related to the life of the glacier. Before the end of the glacier, especially if it is in the stage of contraction, there are also pools of standing water of various sizes. At their bottom, ribbon clays are deposited due to fine earth brought by melt waters, so named because they consist of many regular layers (ribbons) ranging from 0.5 to 5 cm thick. In each ribbon, two parts are distinguished: the upper ( darker, thinner and clayey) and lower (lighter, thicker and sandy). The bottom layer of each ribbon is summer sediment when the glacier, melting vigorously, carries coarser sandy material (along with silt) into the lake with the help of glacial streams. In winter, ablation stops, melt water does not enter the lake, and only the deposition of thin suspended particles occurs in it - a winter clay layer is formed. Consequently, each tape (summer plus winter layer) corresponds in time to one year. This makes it possible to use ribbon clays for the purposes of absolute geochronology of the post-glacial period: counting ribbons in any outcrop makes it possible to establish the time required to create the entire visible thickness of sediments.

Ice, moving along its bed and encountering rocky protrusions on it, gradually smooths them out, turning them into ovoid (in plan) and asymmetrical in longitudinal profile hills - sheep's foreheads, the accumulation of which forms a landscape of curly rocks. Many islands in the skerry region of Finland present a landscape of curly rocks, half-submerged by the sea.

Continental glaciers, passing through the mountain ranges of the country, give the mountain peaks rounded dome-shaped outlines.

The activity of ice and snow owes its existence to special hollow relief forms - pens and cirques, which can be observed in all mountainous countries that were subject to glaciation (in the Altai, Caucasus, Khibiny, Lovozero tundra, etc.).

Karas, or armchairs, are niche-shaped notches in the slopes of a mountain, bounded on three sides by a semicircle of steep and high walls, and on the fourth side open towards the general fall of the slope; the bottom of the car is flat or concave like a bowl, slightly inclined towards the front edge; To the bottom of the valley over which they hang, the karas end with steep ledges.

Glacial cirques are large cup-shaped and steep-walled expansions located at the sources of glacial valleys, and the bottom of the cirque is consistent with the bottom of the valley, that is, it passes into it smoothly, without a sharp ledge.

Karas and cirques are formed as a result of frost weathering with the direct participation of ice, snow and water.

The influence of valley glaciers is not limited to the impact on the firn areas in which cirques are produced, but also extends to the valley occupied by the glacial tongue. This impact is reduced to the transformation of the longitudinal and transverse profile of the valley.

The transverse profile of a normal erosion valley is V-shaped. The glacier that has occupied this valley expands it and cuts off the lower parts of the slopes, as a result of which the transverse profile becomes U-shaped. Such trough-shaped valleys with a flat bottom and steep walls are called togas. The steep wall of the trough at a certain height above the bottom of the trough, corresponding to the thickness of the glacier that occupied this area, becomes flatter; this flat part is called the trough shoulder.

Valleys abandoned by a complex glacier are often characterized by the fact that the bottom of the main trough lies below the bottoms of its side tributaries-troughs, and the mouths of the latter break off above the bottom of the main valley at an altitude of many tens or even several hundred meters. Therefore, the side valleys are hanging. A hanging side valley is formed either because in the main valley, occupied by the most powerful glacier, this latter deepened the valley faster than the less powerful glaciers of the side valleys: different rates of deepening created a gap between the mouths of the side valleys and the bottom of the main one; either because the lower section of the side valley is cut by the rapid expansion of the main trough, that is, by the rapid retreat of its slopes in a direction perpendicular to the flow of the main glacier; or, finally, because even before their occupation by the glacier, the side valleys were not completely consistent with the main valley (that is, the bottom of their mouth areas did not lie at the same level with the bottom of the main valley).

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There are areas on the globe covered with ice and snow that never melt. They are located where the climate is cold and humid, winters are long and snowy, and summers are cool and short. The snow does not have time to melt during the summer. Year after year, it accumulates in depressions or basins and over time covers the surface of the Earth with a continuous cover. Such areas are found in polar countries and high mountain regions. Their total area on the globe is currently about 16 million km 2 .

Snow that accumulates in depressions thaws on the surface on sunny days and freezes again at night. This is how ice crusts are formed, which are well known to skiers under the name crust.

Some of the melt water seeps into the snow layer and freezes there in the form of thin films surrounding individual snowflakes. Each snowflake covered with ice has the appearance of a grain, and the entire layer of snow gradually becomes grainy. Packed, compacted snow with individual grains of ice is called firn.

The grains gradually increase in size. The lower layers of firn become more and more compacted, and finally they turn into an opaque, grainy white ice called firn ice.

Snow continues to accumulate on the surface; Every year the pressure on firn ice increases and it becomes even more compact. Air bubbles are released from it, and the ice grains recrystallize. Gradually, firn ice turns into transparent bluish glacier ice, entirely consisting of ice crystals.

Ice has a very interesting feature - plasticity. Under pressure, it begins to flow like a liquid, while remaining at the same time a solid body, like wax, sealing wax, shoe polish, steel, tin and some other substances. If you place pieces of shoe polish in a funnel and leave them for several hours, the pitch will gradually begin to flow out through the neck of the funnel. But if you hit the flowing stream with a hammer, it will shatter into small fragments, since it is hard and fragile. Thus, frozen shoe polish simultaneously has the properties of both a solid and a liquid body. It is thanks to the plasticity of metals that they can be forged and rolled, wire drawn from them, and stamped.

When a lot of firn and snow accumulate on the glacier ice, and the pressure is high enough, the ice will begin to flow out of the basin, forming a glacier.

Scientists distinguish several types of glaciers. The main ones are continental and mountain glaciers.

The continental glacier covers the island of Greenland and the large southern continent of Antarctica in a continuous mass.

On the island of Greenland, the ice is enormously thick - over 3 km.

How could such a huge ice cap form?

The island is a plain, bordered by mountains on the north and east. On this plain there are depressions, or basins, in which snow accumulated. Gradually it caked, became denser, and turned into firn and then glacier ice. When the pressure on the glacier ice increased so much that it became fluid, glaciers began to slowly flow out of the basin, spreading in all directions, like dough overflowing a pan. Glaciers from different basins merged together and formed a huge ice sheet of great thickness, which began to slide towards the general slope of the area.

Continental glaciers move quite quickly, since glacier ice has great plasticity due to its enormous weight. The speed of some glaciers in Greenland reaches 40 m per day.

The glaciers of Greenland and Antarctica descend into the ocean, break off and give rise to floating ice mountains - icebergs. Large icebergs take the form of either bizarre rocks, sometimes more than 100 m high above sea level, or floating islands reaching several tens of kilometers in length. Sometimes they look like huge tables with a flat top covered with dazzling white snow. Gradually, the ice islands melt and take on amazing shapes, reminiscent of Egyptian pyramids, arches, towers, huge marble statues, and castles. They sparkle and shimmer with sunrays in various shades of blue and green, and at sunset they glow with crimson and purple lights. An iceberg illuminated by the sun is an incredibly beautiful sight.

The silently moving icy mass of an iceberg sometimes looks like a white ghost.

In 1912, the huge steamship Titanic, which was crossing the Atlantic Ocean, sank when it collided with an iceberg in the fog, carried by the current to latitudes where floating ice was not usually found. In previous years, ship captains had to peer intensely into the darkness to avoid a disastrous encounter with an iceberg. Now ships are equipped with radars - devices that warn in advance of danger.

Travelers in the northern seas were sometimes able to observe an interesting phenomenon - the explosions of icebergs floating on the ocean waters. These explosions amaze with their unexpectedness and beauty.

Here a huge snow-white ice rock floats majestically. Suddenly, an explosion shakes the air and the rock shatters into small fragments, which rise upward and then rain down onto the surface of the ocean. The impression is as if a bomb had hit an iceberg.

Scientists have determined the cause of the explosions of ice mountains. The fact is that freshly fallen snow contains a lot of air, which, when the ice and snow compacts, penetrates into the glacier and gradually leaves from there through cracks. But if there are no cracks, then air may accumulate in some void or chamber inside the ice. There he is under great pressure. As the ice compacts, the pressure increases. When a glacier melts, the chamber with compressed air may suddenly open, as a result of which the pressure in it will immediately drop sharply and the air will quickly expand. All this will cause a real explosion. If you walk on the surface of a glacier on a hot sunny day, you can hear sounds similar to crunching. They come from somewhere under our feet, from the inner parts of the glacier.

For a long time, people could not understand the origin of this crunch and associated various legends about mountain spirits with it. But in fact, it is small chambers with compressed air that explode inside the glacier.

Mountain glaciers originate from basins located on the slopes of high mountains, above the permanent snow line. They flow down gorges and valleys. On its way, the ice expands and grinds down the slopes of the valley, which is why it gradually takes on the characteristic shape of a trough; That's why the glacial valley is called a trough, which means "trough" in Norwegian. If you look at a mountain glacier from above, it looks like a wide river that suddenly stopped.

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Glaciers are natural formations that are accumulations of ice of atmospheric origin. On the surface of our planet, glaciers occupy more than 16 million square meters. km, that is, about 11% of the total land area, and their total volume reaches 30 million cubic meters. km. More than 99% of the total area of ​​the Earth's glaciers belongs to the polar regions. However, glaciers can be seen even near the equator, but they are located on the tops of high mountains. For example, the highest peak in Africa - Mount Kilimanjaro - is topped by a glacier, which is located at least 4500 m.

Glaciers form on areas of the earth's surface when the amount of solid atmospheric precipitation that falls over many years exceeds the amount of precipitation that can melt or evaporate. The line above which the snow that falls during the year does not have time to melt is called the snow line. The height of its location depends on the climatic characteristics of the area. In the mountains located near the equator, the snow line is at an altitude of 4.5-5 thousand meters, and towards the poles it drops to ocean level. Above the snow line, glaciers form from the snow that accumulates and compacts there.

Glaciers occupy 11% of the land area. There are 2 types of glaciers: cover or continental glaciers and mountain glaciers. Cover glaciers make up 98% of the total area of ​​glaciers on the earth's surface. Ice sheets occupy Antarctica, Greenland and some Arctic islands. For example, the thickness of the Greenland glacier reaches 2000 m. Such glaciers have the shape of shields and domes.
On the coastal parts of Antarctica and Greenland, gigantic blocks of ice - icebergs - break off from the edge of ice sheets. Their length sometimes exceeds 300 km, the height reaches 600-700 m, about 90% of its volume is usually under water. A collision between a ship and it is very dangerous. (What was the largest passenger ship at that time wrecked after colliding with an iceberg at the beginning of the 20th century?) The area of ​​mountain glaciers is much smaller, they follow the shape of the valley along which they slide down.
The snow accumulated in the mountains above the snow line becomes compacted and gradually turns into ice. The ice falls down under the influence of weight and begins to melt. The speed of movement of glaciers, depending on the slope of the mountain slopes and the amount of ice, reaches from several centimeters to 3 meters per day.
Glaciers, having descended from the mountain tops below the snow line, melt, feeding mountain rivers. Despite the slow movement of valley glaciers, they carry rock fragments from one place to another and accumulate them at the edge of the glaciers. In our country, mountain glaciers are common in the Tien Shan, Zhungar Alatau and Altai. The largest mountain glacier in Kazakhstan is the Korzhenevsky glacier in the Trans-Ili Alatau. Its length is 12 km.

The largest ice sheet on Earth is the Antarctic. The ice thickness here reaches 4 km with an average thickness of 1.5 km. Within a single cover, there are separate ice streams flowing from the center of the continent to the periphery; the largest of them is the Bidmore Glacier, flowing from the Victoria Mountains; it is 180 km long and 15-20 km wide. Along the edge of the Antarctic ice sheet, large glaciers are widespread, the ends of which float in the sea. Such glaciers are called shelf glaciers. The largest of them in Antarctica is the Ross Glacier. It is twice the size of Great Britain.

The other largest ice sheet on Earth is the Greenland Ice Sheet, which covers almost the entire territory of the huge island. Glaciers in other areas of the Arctic are much smaller in size. Greenland and Antarctic glaciers often descend to coastal parts of the ocean. In these cases, blocks of ice can break off from them, turning into floating sea mountains - icebergs.

The following zones are distinguished in the structure of glaciers:

Glacier feeding area. Snow accumulates here, which does not have time to melt completely during the summer period. This is where the glacier is born from the snow. Snow is deposited every winter, but the thickness of the layer depends on the amount of precipitation falling in a particular location. In Antarctica, for example, the annual layer of snow is 1-15 cm, and all this snow goes to replenish the ice sheet. On the eastern coast of Kamchatka, 8-10 meters of snow accumulates per year. Here is the “snow pole” of Eurasia. In glacier feeding areas in the Caucasus, Tien Shan, and Pamirs, 2-3 meters of snow accumulates per year, and this is enough to restore summer melting costs.

Ablation area (Latin ablatio - demolition, loss). In this area, the mass of the glacier decreases due to melting, evaporation, or the separation of icebergs (near ice sheets). Glacier ablation is especially strong in the mountains below the snow line, which contributes to the high flow of rivers starting from the glacier. For example, in the Caucasus, Central Asia, etc. For some rivers in Central Asia, the share of glacial runoff reaches 50-70% in summer. But the amount of water released by glaciers fluctuates greatly depending on melting conditions in a given summer. Glacier researchers have conducted a number of experiments on the glaciers of the Tien Shan and Pamir to artificially increase the melting of glaciers in order to increase the flow of meltwater to cotton fields in dry years. It was found that it is possible to increase the flow from glaciers by covering their surface with coal dust. On clear days, melting increased by 25% (dark surfaces absorb more sunlight than light ones).

Glaciers tend to flow, revealing plastic properties. In this case, one or more glacier tongues are formed. The speed of glacier movement reaches several hundred meters per year, but it does not remain constant. Since the plasticity of ice depends on temperature, the glacier moves faster in summer than in winter. Glacial tongues resemble rivers: precipitation collects in a channel and flows along the slopes.

Areas where mountain glaciers exist are characterized by the phenomenon of snow avalanches. Thanks to them, the glacial areas are unloaded. An avalanche is a collapse of snow that slides down mountain slopes and carries snow masses along its path. Avalanches can occur on slopes steeper than 15°. The causes of avalanches are different: the looseness of the snow in the first time after it falls; increase in temperature in the lower horizons of snow due to pressure, thaw. In any case, an avalanche has enormous destructive power. The impact power in them reaches 100 tons per 1 square. m. The impetus for the start of a snowfall can be the slightest imbalance of the hanging snow masses: a sharp cry, a weapon shot. In avalanche-prone areas, work is underway to prevent and remove avalanches. Avalanches are most common in the Alps (they are called here “white destruction” - they can destroy an entire village), the Cordillera, and the Caucasus.

Glaciers play a big role not only in nature, but also in human life. This is the greatest repository of fresh water, so necessary for man.

Hydrological significance of glaciers

Melt water from mountain glaciers is one of the sources of river nutrition. The share of glacial feeding in the total flow of most rivers originating from glaciers is relatively small and only in close proximity to the glacier can it reach 50% of the annual flow and sometimes slightly exceed this value. The rest of the annual flow of these rivers is formed by other sources of nutrition, mainly the melting of seasonal snows lying on the surface of the glacier and the slopes framing it. As you move away from the glacier and the degree of glaciation of the river basin decreases, the share of glacial nutrition noticeably decreases. Nevertheless, the presence of glaciers in a river basin creates completely unique features of the flow regime and levels throughout the year and has a significant impact on the variability of the annual flow of such rivers, significantly reducing it. The decrease in the coefficient of variation of annual runoff occurs mainly due to an increase in runoff in years with low precipitation, when the share of glacier meltwater runoff increases. Rivers fed by glaciers are characterized by extended summer floods and relatively small fluctuations in levels and flow rates (Tien Shan type of water regime, according to Zaikov’s classification). At the beginning of the flood, the flow of such rivers occurs due to the melting of seasonal snow both on the glacier itself and on the mountain slopes framing the glacier. The increase in water flow occurs slowly, which is associated with slow warming in the basin and small melting areas, as well as the regulating role of the glacier itself. As the glacier's tongue frees itself from the snow cover, meltwater from snow and ice simultaneously begins to feed the river. The role of glacier feeding is gradually increasing. Depending on the melting regime and the size of the areas simultaneously covered by melting, maximum flow rates during the flood period are observed in July-early August. The recession ends by October. Against the general background of an increased flood wave, individual floods are observed both on the rise and fall. Their appearance is caused by changes in weather and changes in the intensity of melting. Sometimes floods are the result of rapid release of water from glacial lakes or other reservoirs in the body of a glacier, caused by the breaking of ice bridges or moraines. Cases of such floods were observed, for example, in 1958 on the Seldara River, flowing from the Fedchenko glacier, and its upper tributary, the river. M. Tanymass. Sometimes floods reach catastrophic proportions, cause destruction and are accompanied by loss of life. Outbursts of glacial lakes are known in many glacial regions (Alps, Cordillera, Himalayas, Scandinavia, Karakoram, etc.).

1 Glaciers are reservoirs in which water is stored for many centuries, and therefore any disturbance in the functioning of the glacial environment directly affects human civilization.

2 The glacier creates a local climate whose conditions are favorable to frost weathering.

3 Like flowing waters, glaciers do a lot of work by destroying, transporting and redepositing rocks and creating characteristic forms of glacial relief.