Extreme landscapes: Glacial landforms 1

There are many different landforms created by glaciers, which is not surprising even their prevalence, size and power. I am going to split them into 2 types erosion and deposition, it could as easily be divided into upland and lowland formations. I am going to have a look at erosional landforms in this blog and depositional landforms in the next. This should allow me to use a few pictures of the magnificent landforms features.

Erosion formations This is a Cirque. generally found at the start of a glacier. It is a bowl-shaped depression eroded into the side of a mountain by an alpine glacier.









Pictures say a thousand words and this diagram shows how the cirque is formed.


This is a U shaped valley that typically have steep sides and flat floors. The glacier widens, steepens, deepens and smooths pre-existing V-shaped river valley.










A hanging valley occurs when a tributary rivers joins the U shaped valley that is lower. It often leads to spectacular waterfall.





When a river erodes the landscape, ridges of land form in its upper course which jut into the river. These are called interlocking spurs. A glacier cuts through these ridges leaving behind truncated spurs


An arête is a knife-edge ridge. It is formed when two neighbouring corries run back to back. As each glacier erodes either side of the ridge, the edge becomes steeper and the ridge becomes narrower, eg Striding Edge found on Helvellyn in the Lake District. (BBC bitesize)

















A pyramidal peak is formed where three or more corries and arêtes meet. The glaciers have carved away at the top of a mountain, creating a sharply pointed summit, eg Mont Blanc, The Matterhorn and Mount Everest. (BBC bitesize)












Other formations develop such as ribbon lakes that occur after the glacial has melted, they are often deep and flat bottomed. Roches moutonnée and Crag and tail are formations that develop when there is a change in the type of rock that the glacier passes over.

The erosional formations can create dramatic scenery and exciting places to visit often in National Parks.