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GLACIER
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
A slowly moving mass of ice
Classified under:
Nouns denoting natural objects (not man-made)
Hypernyms ("glacier" is a kind of...):
ice mass (a large mass of ice)
Meronyms (parts of "glacier"):
icefall (a steep part of a glacier resembling a frozen waterfall)
moraine (accumulated earth and stones deposited by a glacier)
neve (the upper part of a glacier (beyond the limit of perpetual snow) where the snow turns to ice)
Meronyms (substance of "glacier"):
ice; water ice (water frozen in the solid state)
Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "glacier"):
Alpine glacier; Alpine type of glacier (a glacier that moves down from a high valley)
continental glacier (a glacier that spreads out from a central mass of ice)
Piedmont glacier; Piedmont type of glacier (a type of glaciation characteristic of Alaska; large valley glaciers meet to form an almost stagnant sheet of ice)
Derivation:
glacial (relating to or derived from a glacier)
glaciate (become frozen and covered with glaciers)
glaciate (cover with ice or snow or a glacier)
Context examples:
No; it was St. John Rivers, who, lifting the latch, came in out of the frozen hurricane—the howling darkness—and stood before me: the cloak that covered his tall figure all white as a glacier.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
They went across divides in summer blizzards, shivered under the midnight sun on naked mountains between the timber line and the eternal snows, dropped into summer valleys amid swarming gnats and flies, and in the shadows of glaciers picked strawberries and flowers as ripe and fair as any the Southland could boast.
(The Call of the Wild, by Jack London)
A similar pattern emerged near the end of that cold snap, transitioning out of the ice age; the current started strengthening roughly 400 years before the atmosphere began to heat up dramatically, when Greenland warmed up rapidly — its average temperature climbed by about 8 degrees over just a few decades, causing glaciers to melt and sea ice to drop off considerably in the North Atlantic.
(A new study is the first to measure the time lags between changing ocean currents and major climate shifts., University of Cambridge)
As the glacier thins and loses mass, both sliding and creeping become more difficult, and the glacier's flow slows as a result.
(NASA Finds Asian Glaciers Slowed by Ice Loss, NASA)
Over the past 26 years, the glacier’s terminus has retreated more than 5 kilometers (3 miles).
(Retreat of Yakutat Glacier, NASA)
The desert mountains and dreary glaciers are my refuge.
(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)
Two of its tributary glaciers also are flowing faster and thinning rapidly.
(Antarctica’s Larsen B Ice Shelf Nearing Its Final Act, NASA)
Then, seating himself opposite to me, he looked at me long and fixedly with his strange, twinkling, reckless eyes—eyes of a cold light blue, the color of a glacier lake.
(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
They found that Greenland's glaciers flowing into the ocean are grounded deeper below sea level than previously measured.
(The Hidden Meltdown of Greenland, NASA)
It was a hard day’s run, up the Cañon, through Sheep Camp, past the Scales and the timber line, across glaciers and snowdrifts hundreds of feet deep, and over the great Chilcoot Divide, which stands between the salt water and the fresh and guards forbiddingly the sad and lonely North.
(The Call of the Wild, by Jack London)
