Glaciers on Earth

A glacier is like a great river of ice. Glaciers appear when more snow falls than melts every year. The snow collects, squeezing the lower layer hard. It turns ice and forms a glacier. All the time snow added at the top, the glacier would move forward under its own weight. Most of the glaciers present today are the one left from the last age in the past two million years there have been five glaciations. Ice- sheets spread from mountain areas and from the Artic to cover most of Europe. The ice covers only 10 percent of the land surface. Most of the world’s ice is in Antarctica. The artic has only 12 percent, and the rest is in the glaciers, which exist on every continent. The longest glacier is the Lambert - Fisher ice passage in Antarctica, which is 515 kilometers long. Petermanns glacier in Greenland is the largest glacier in the northern hemisphere, 40 kilometers out to sea. If all the ice in the world melted, new land would reveal in the Arctic and the Antarctic and in some mountains. However, large area of the world would be flooded as sea- level arose. Sea- level has changed in the past during glacial and inter- glacial, so it may change in the future. IF the world’s ice melted, sea level would rise by at least 65 meters, Denmark would be flooded, and many great capitals such as London, Dublin, Paris, Rome and Helsinki would drown.