In geography, a glacial deposit is a glacial landform, created by big rock or stones deposited in the landscape when the glacier withdraws.

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.

A moraine is made up of till, the mixture of sediment deposited by a glacier. A moraine forms when a ridge of till is deposited at the edges or at the lower end of a glacier. A terminal moraine forms at the farthest point reached by the glacier as the glacier begins melting back.

As glaciers move and retreat, they push and drop rocks and sediments in a process known as glacial deposition. Learn about this glacial process and the interesting landforms that result from it, including moraines, erratics and drumlins, in this lesson.

The name given to all material deposited by a glacier is called glacial till or boulder clay .

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.

The two main types of erosion are:

• Abrasion – as the glacier moves downhill, rocks that have been frozen into the base and sides of the glacier scrape the rock beneath.
• Plucking – rocks become frozen into the bottom and sides of the glacier.

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.

Glacial erosion includes processes that occur directly in association with the movement of glacial ice over its bed, such as abrasion, quarrying, and physical and chemical erosion by subglacial meltwater, as well as from the fluvial and mass wasting processes that are enhanced or modified by glaciation.

They are formed in areas where the general temperature is usually below freezing. This can be near the North and South poles, and also on very high ground, such as large mountains. Snow upon snow on the land becomes compacted and turns into ice.

It is hard to see glacial erosion in action because glaciers move at an extremely slow pace. Some of the fastest glaciers can move 30 meters a day,…

There are two main processes of glacial erosion. The first that we will talk about is plucking, which is defined as the erosion and transport of large chunks of rocks. As a glacier moves over the landscape, water melts below the glacier and seeps into cracks within the underlying bedrock.

It ranges from tens of thousands to a few million years. This result implies that while the glacier will respond to short-term variations (10–100 years), it will take much longer (i.e., 10 kyr to 10 Myr) for glacial erosion to reequilibrate with rock uplift rates in response to changes in climate forcings.

Erosion involved three processes: detachment (from the ground), transportation (via water or wind), and deposition. The deposition is often in places we don’t want the soil such as streams, lakes, reservoirs, or deltas.