The Arctic is a strange and unusual place where nature still rules with and icy fist. In the land of the "high noon moon", the extreme cold has a strange effect on the environment, the people, and even everyday objects that we take for granted act different. Ice rules the land and shapes it to it's will. Layers of cold air change a normal scene into a wonderland of color and mystery. Normal, everyday items take on unusual characteristics in the sub-zero climate.
Ice wedges are structures where water has filled a crack or hole in the ground and froze over the winter. As the water freezes, it expands, making the crack bigger.
As the Wedge gets bigger, the whole it creates gets bigger and gets fovered with sediments and dirt.
On the surface, these ice wedges make the ground look like a patchwork of tiles, called polygons.
As the wedge gets deeper, it begins to melt and the water is then put under high pressure from the surrounding ice and dirt. This causes the water to be forced to the surface. As it moves twards the surface, the rock and soil above it are pushed out of the way, making pingos. These pingos are usually a small hill with a ring or rock and soil at the center. Many pingos, thought, can reach the size of a house or other large building.
When we think of a mirage, we usually think of a hot desert. In the arctic, though, the thermal layering of the cold air causes a similar effect. The effect is the opposite of a heat mirage though. Here, you can see that the mountain looks to be up-side down and mushroom shaped.
In the winter in the far north, the temperatures can get real low! This was the coldest temperature during the winter of '03-'04. The extreme cold allowed me to have a little fun and also caused a few problems.
On the morning that the temperature reached -54F, i decided to get up early and go into town to get a picture of a sign so all my friends would beleave me when i told them how cold it had been, when i started to move in the car, however, i noticed that the tired felt wierd as i drove. When the air in the tires is supercooled, he presure drops and the tires arreap to deflate, causing the bottoms to become flattened against the ground.
The Kettleby till is considered to be younger than the main till in the area because it may have been deposited by ice contact stratified drift. Ice contact stratified drift is normally deposited by meltwater in contact and or in close proximity to the ice sheet. Stratification and some sorting do takes place.
The word Tundra comes from the Finnish word Tunturia which means treeless plain. There's no vegetation because of the extreme weather conditions. It is located near the north pole and it also covers a fifth of the earth's surface. If it's too cold not vegetation can grow because of the ice caps not melting, if it gets a little warmer than maybe roots can grow. The arctic tundra has two seasons winter and summer, but the sun only heats up the tundra to 3 degrees celsius to 12 degrees celsius. When the sun cannot rise the temperatures drop to very cold conditions around -70 degrees celsius while the average temperature is -28 degrees celsius. The rain levels in the tundra are 6 to 10 inches a year because most of it falls as snow instead. It is basically a very cold desert.
The concept of lake-effect snow is rather simple. It starts when cold arctic air from Canada moves southwest across the great lakes, which are warmer than the air. As the air moves across the lakes evaporation occurs. The moist air is cooled as it is lifted up and then turned into snow. This snow does not stop until the cold arctic winds stop drifting across the lakes. Hills and valleys on the shore of the lakes intensify the amount of snow an area receives. The shore of the lakes as well as, any hills or valleys, cause the masses of moist air to slow down and “pile up”.
would snow up to depths of eight inches and sometimes it would rain and hail for
Enhanced Basal Creep - Stress concentrations around the upstream side of an obstacle result in locally high strain rates which causes ice to accelerate around the obstacle. The basal ice continually modifies its shape to allow a continued sliding. This process works best when the obstacle is over 1m in size.
The Tundra suffers a very harsh climate. Because of this fact most of the area
The Greenland ice sheet is the second largest ice mass on Earth and is about one-tenth the volume of the Antarctic ice sheet. It is the only significant ice mass in the Arctic today. [ See Antarctica and Climate Change ; and Ice Sheets .] It is an ice-age relict that overlies a bowl-shaped continent almost completely fringed by coastal mountains.
As the world becomes continually warmer, the effect of climate change in the arctic regions becomes more intense. Within the past 50 years, arctic regions in Canada have experienced warming of 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (Fergal & Prowse, 2007). One of the most important areas in the Canadian arctic is the Cryosphere (Appendix A), which is the area consisting of season snow cover, permafrost glaciers, and sea ice (Fergal & Prowse, 2007). This area is significant because it has provided a stabilized surface for building pipelines, as well as provides access to northern communities (Fergal & Prowse, 2007).
Pressure on the ice reduces the melting point. If pressure is afterward reduced, water will freeze again. This is called regelation. When a player skates across the ice, he or she applies a lot of pressure, leaving a trail of water where the blades were. Because the pressure leaves quickly, the water freezes to ice again (Haché 22). Nevertheless, pressure is not the only factor that causes this melting. Friction also takes part because it creates heat. With help...
Surface Creep occurs when landing sand particles remove the larger and heavier particles, pushing them forward.
Mudslides usually occur in hilly areas, for an example, when there was a mudslide in Bangladesh few months back, it occurred at Chittagong. Mudslides occur when a portion of a hill side becomes too weak to hold up its own weight. This is generally caused by an intense amount of rain fall. With all of the new water introduced into the slope the content of liquid makes it so heavy that gravity pulls it downward. Although water plays a major factor in creating the mud that flows in a mudslide the real reason that the land begins to slide is gravity. What happens is mudslides redistribute soil and sediments in a process that can be in abrupt collapses or in slow gradual slides.
There are many different glacial landforms created by glacial erosion, one of these landforms is U-shaped valleys or glacial troughs. This glacial landform has many distinct characteristics. One of these characteristics is that it has very steep valley sides caused by the glacier as it moves down the valley eroding the sides of the valley by the processes of abrasion and plucking. Abrasion is when the boulders and moraine carried by the glacier rubs and erodes the valley side as it physically moves down the valley. Plucking happens when the water in the glacier freezes inside of the cracks in the individual rocks on the valley side then the water freezes and as the glacier moves the rock is plucked or torn from the valley side producing the steep side to the valley.
They are the earth’s crust; they move very slowly every year. As the tectonic plates slide over each other they cause earthquakes. Earthquakes produce various damaging effects this includes damage to structures of buildings, bridges and other standing formations which then...
captive by a sheath of frost, as were the glacial branches that scraped at my windows, begging to get in. It is indeed the coldest year I can remember, with winds like barbs that caught and pulled at my skin. People ceaselessly searched for warmth, but my family found that this year, the warmth was searching for us.