Glaciers form various glacial erosional and depositional forms like
EROSIONAL LANDFORMS
- Cirque:Cirques are bowl-shaped, amphitheatre like depressions that glaciers carve into mountains and valley sidewalls high elevations.
- Horns and Serrated Ridges: If three or more radiating glaciers cut headward until their cirques meet, high, sharp pointed and steep sided peaks called horns form. The divides between cirque side walls or head walls get narrow because of progressive erosion and turn into serrated or saw-toothed ridges sometimes referred to as arêtes with very sharp crest and a zig-zag outline
- Glacial Valleys/Troughs: Glacial troughs, or glaciated valleys, are long, U-shaped valleys that were carved out by glaciers that have since receded or disappeared. Troughs tend to have flat valley floors and steep, straight sides.
DEPOSITIONAL LANDOFRMS:
- Moraines: They are long ridges of deposits of glacial till. Terminal moraines are long ridges of debris deposited at the end (toe) of the glaciers. Lateral moraines form along the sides parallel to the glacial valleys. The lateral moraines may join a terminal moraine forming a horse-shoe shaped ridge.
- Eskers: Very coarse materials like boulders and blocks along with some minor fractions of rock debris carried into this stream settle in the valley of ice beneath the glacier and after the ice melts can be found as a sinuous ridge called esker.
- Outwash Plains: The plains at the foot of the glacial mountains or beyond the limits of continental ice sheets are covered with glacio-fluvial deposits in the form of broad flat alluvial fans which may join to form outwash plains of gravel, silt, sand and clay.
- Drumlins: The drumlins form due to the dumping of rock debris beneath heavily loaded ice through fissures in the glacier. The stoss end gets blunted due to pushing by moving ice. Drumlins give an indication of the direction of glacier movement.
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