Question

UNIT 11: GLACIERS

While on a skiing trip in the Alps, you take a wrong turn into an “off limits” area and end up falling into a deep glacial crevasse. You are frozen solid like a popsicle in a few hours. Over the years, advances in technology have solved the global warming crisis but have gone badly awry, plunging the world into another ice age. One hundred thousand years later, climate has changed yet again and the glaciers are now melting. Eventually, the ice melts around you and you drop out of the glacier to the ground below. You thaw out and revive to find yourself about 5 miles from the ocean, at the bottom of a deep, narrow valley surrounded by steep-sided mountains. Hungry after your long, frozen sleep, you decide to follow the stream of meltwater flowing out of the glacier to the coast to find food.

Questions:

1. In what type of glacier did you get trapped ?
   Cite evidence from the story to explain your answer.

2. In what type of glacial deposit are you--glacial till ?---or outwash ? Cite evidence from the story to explain your answer.

3. What type of stream(s) will you be following from the glacier to the coast ? [meandering or braided]

   Explain.

4. What features might you encounter as you follow this glacial stream to the coast ?

5. What type(s) of features might be forming at the coast where this stream enters the ocean ?

6. What type of coast will be present in this area once all of the glacial ice has melted ? [emergent or submergent]

   Explain.

Answer 1

It is an alpine glacier or a mountainous glacier.

The glacial deposit is a glacial till.

The stream type is braided.

There may be lateral moraines, point bars, levees etc.

Fiords may have been formed where the stream enters the Sea or there may be the formation of the delta.

As the ice age is receding and the thawing is taking place the chances are that there will be submergent coast.