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Mountain of Ice

Life Cycle of a Glacier


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Launch interactive Life Cycle of a Glacier

At first glance, it may seem that the life cycle of a glacier couldn't be more straightforward: snow accumulates at the high end of a glacier, and the ice that the snow turns into flows downhill until it melts, evaporates, or falls into the sea. Well, it turns out that a biography of your average glacier is more eventful than that, as you'll discover when you follow the journey of a single snowflake as it takes a ride through a glacier, a process that can take as much as 30,000 years to complete. To launch the interactive, click on the image at left.—Rick Groleau

   

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