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Ablation zone or ablation area refers to the low-altitude area of a glacier or ice sheet below firn with a net loss in ice mass. This loss can result from melting , sublimation , evaporation , ice calving , aeolian processes like blowing snow , avalanche , and any other ablation .
Ablation can refer to mass loss from the upper surface of a glacier or ocean-driven melt and calving on the face of a glacier terminus. [7] Ablation can refer either to the processes removing ice and snow or to the quantity of ice and snow removed. Debris-covered glaciers have also been shown to greatly impact the ablation process.
Ice calving, also known as glacier calving or iceberg calving, is the breaking of ice chunks from the edge of a glacier. [1] It is a form of ice ablation or ice disruption. It is the sudden release and breaking away of a mass of ice from a glacier, iceberg, ice front, ice shelf, or crevasse. The ice that breaks away can be classified as an ...
A glacier originates at a location called its glacier head and terminates at its glacier foot, snout, or terminus. Glaciers are broken into zones based on surface snowpack and melt conditions. [ 29 ] The ablation zone is the region where there is a net loss in glacier mass.
Ablation is the reverse of accumulation: it includes all the processes by which a glacier can lose mass. The main ablation process for most glaciers that are entirely land-based is melting; the heat that causes melting can come from sunlight, or ambient air, or from rain falling on the glacier, or from geothermal heat below the glacier bed.
Glacial stream discharge fluctuates throughout the year depending on snowmelt, glacier ablation, channel boundary melt, and precipitation. [3] Measurements of discharge increase during spring and are highest in the summer, during which warmer temperatures promote the additions of meltwater. [7]
Glacier ice accumulation occurs through accumulation of snow and other frozen precipitation, as well as through other means including rime ice (freezing of water vapor on the glacier surface), avalanching from hanging glaciers on cliffs and mountainsides above, and re-freezing of glacier meltwater as superimposed ice.
The sediments carried by a glacier will eventually be deposited some distance down-ice from its source. This takes place in the ablation zone, which is the part of the glacier where the rate of ablation (removal of ice by evaporation, melting, or other processes) exceeds the rate of accumulation of new ice from snowfall. As ice is removed ...