There are two main types of glaciers: continental glaciers and alpine glaciers.

Glaciers are made up of fallen snow that, over many years, compresses into large, thickened ice masses. Glaciers form when snow remains in one location long enough to transform into ice.

Glacier Landforms

• U-Shaped Valleys, Fjords, and Hanging Valleys. Glaciers carve a set of distinctive, steep-walled, flat-bottomed valleys.
• Cirques.
• Nunataks, Arêtes, and Horns.
• Lateral and Medial Moraines.
• Terminal and Recessional Moraines.
• Glacial Till and Glacial Flour.
• Glacial Erratics.
• Glacial Striations.

Extensive glaciers are found in Antarctica, Argentina, Chile, Canada, Alaska, Greenland and Iceland. Mountain glaciers are widespread, especially in the Andes, the Himalayas, the Rocky Mountains, the Caucasus, Scandinavian mountains, and the Alps.

Most glaciers move very slowly—only a few centimeters a day. Some, though, can move 50 meters (160 feet) a day. These fast-moving rivers of ice are called galloping glaciers.

A glacier is slowest moving where it comes in contact with the ground. This is actually a pervasive physical phenomena that is also true about other flowing mediums like air moving over an airplane wing or water flowing down a river. This is referred to as a “boundary layer” in engineering.

The progressive breakdown of material in traction provides a mechanism for the continued replenishment of debris that can carry out erosion beneath ice-masses, even where they flow across hard rocks of uniform lithology. Thus, glacial erosion is most efficient beneath temperate ice.

There are three main types of glacial erosion – plucking, abrasion and freeze thaw. Plucking is when melt water from a glacier freezes around lumps of cracked and broken rock.

Glaciers cause erosion in two main ways: plucking and abrasion. They freeze to the bottom of the glacier and are carried away by the flowing ice. Abrasion is the process in which a glacier scrapes underlying rock. The sediments and rocks frozen in the ice at the bottom and sides of a glacier act like sandpaper.

Glacial lakes are examples of ice erosion. They occur when a glacier carves its way into a place and then melts over time, filling up the space that it carved out with water. Yosemite Valley, an area in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, was carved out by ice erosion.

Glaciers are incredibly powerful agents of erosion. Valley glaciers create very distinctive landforms like horns, cirques, and hanging valleys. Glaciers pluck rocks from valley walls. This turns a V-shaped river valley into a U-shaped glacial valley.

When a glacier melts it deposits the sediment it eroded from land, creating various landforms. Name some glacial landforms? Fiord, cirque, horn, arete, glacial lake, u-shaped valley, moraine, kettle lake, drumline. Waves shape the coast through erosion by breaking down rock and moving sand and other sediment.

The resulting erosional landforms include striations, cirques, glacial horns, arêtes, trim lines, U-shaped valleys, roches moutonnées, overdeepenings and hanging valleys. U-shaped, or trough, valley: U-shaped valleys are created by mountain glaciers.

Fjords, glaciated valleys, and horns are all erosional types of landforms, created when a glacier cuts away at the landscape. Other types of glacial landforms are created by the features and sediments left behind after a glacier retreats.