An esker is a sinuous ridge made of sediment, formed by the flow of a meltwater stream below the ice. As the glacier melts and recedes, the esker is exposed. When water flows on top of or through the ice it may deposit sediment that gradually accumulates into a mound.

As the ice melts away, the debris that was originally frozen into the ice commonly forms a rocky and/or muddy blanket over the glacier margin. This layer often slides off the ice in the form of mudflows. The resulting deposit is called a flow-till by some authors.

Outwash Plain The large quantities of water that flowed from the melting ice deposited various kinds of materials, the most important of which is called glacial outwash. Outwash plains are made up of outwash deposits are characteristically flat.

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.

Moraines are ridge-like depositional features of glacial tills. Moraines consist of rock materials of heterogeneous shapes and size.

Deposition is the geological process in which sediments, soil and rocks are added to a landform or landmass. Wind, ice, water, and gravity transport previously weathered surface material, which, at the loss of enough kinetic energy in the fluid, is deposited, building up layers of sediment.

Erosion is the removal of particles (rock, sediment etc.) from a landscape, usually due to rain or wind. Deposition begins when erosion stops; the moving particles fall out of the water or wind and settle on a new surface. This is deposition.

But the most powerful erosive force on earth is not wind but water, which causes erosion in its solid form — ice-and as a liquid. Streams — from tiny creeks to huge rivers — carry tons of eroded earth every year.

These examples illustrate physical weathering:

• Swiftly moving water. Rapidly moving water can lift, for short periods of time, rocks from the stream bottom.
• Ice wedging. Ice wedging causes many rocks to break.
• Plant roots. Plant roots can grow in cracks.