Voyage 5 Log

Ice is Nice – Glacier Fun Facts
Gaby Pilson, Hiking Master & Expedition Guide
Glaciers have, quite literally, shaped our world. Without glaciers, the rolling hills and wide valleys we know
today would look very different, but it turns out that these icy giants have a much longer and more storied
history than many of us would initially suspect. Here are some of the best fun facts about glaciers:
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© Renato Granieri Photography
Glaciers are formed by snowflakes. Although it’s
crazy to think that a tiny snowflake can create
something as large as a glacier, without snow,
glaciers would never exist in the first place. To
form a glacier, massive amounts of snow must
accumulate and persist in a single location all
year-long for hundreds, if not thousands of
years. During this time, the individual snowflakes
found in the snowpack change in a process
known as snowflake metamorphosis, where
individual ice grains fuse together and get bigger
and air bubbles get smaller. Once the icepack
builds up enough mass to start flowing downhill,
then voila! We have a glacier.
© Renato Granieri Photography
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Not just anything can be a glacier. In fact, there’s
a size requirement that a piece of ice has to
meet to become a glacier. Anything considered a
glacier must be at least 0.1 km 2 (nearly 25 acres)
in area to be worthy of the name. Although
there’s a minimum size requirement to be
considered a glacier, there’s no upper limit to
glacierhood. The longest glacier on earth is the
Lambert Glacier of Antarctica, which measures
out to some 434 km (270 mi) long. The world’s
largest non-polar glacier is the Fedchenko
Glacier of Tajikistan, which measures a
respectable 77km (48mi) long.
© Renato Granieri Photography
Glaciers are found all over the world, not just in
the polar regions. While the majority of glaciers
and glacial ice is concentrated in high northern
and southern latitudes, glaciers are found even
near the equator, such as on Mount Kilimanjaro
in Tanzania and in the mountains of Ecuador.
That being said, about half of the world’s
200,000 glaciers are found in one place: Alaska.
There, glaciers cover a whopping 72,500 km 2
(28,000 mi 2 ) of the US state’s total area. That’s a
lot of ice.
Glaciers are basically really, really, really slow-moving rivers. To be considered a glacier, a large mass of ice
must be physically moving downhill. This movement downhill is driven by gravity and is the main reason
why glaciers also act as major agents of erosion. Since glaciers move downhill, they often remove and
transport large boulders and chunks of rock, depositing them much further downhill then where they
started.
23-30 June, 2019
Volume 1, Issue 5