Glacial Environments

Enhanced by many photographic illustrations of extraordinaryquality, this textbook will provide students with a completeintroduction to the scientific study of environments dominated by snowand ice. Glacial environments are scenically and scientifically amongthe most exciting on Earth, and at the same time they are among themost complex. Apart from the processes associated directly with movingice, other processes -- fluvial, acolian, lacustrine, and marine --frequently interact with ice. Glacial environments therefore exhibit awide variety of landforms and sediment associations. Today, some ten per cent of the land surface of the Earth is coveredby ice, whereas in the Pleistocene the figure exceeded thirty per cent.In earlier geological history, the Earth underwent glaciations ofcontinent-wide extent on several occasions, some of them even moreintense than those of the Pleistocene. By examining the processesoperating within glacial settings and their resulting products,Glacial Environments provides the foundation for investigationof both the ancient and the modern record. Emphasizing the range of erosional and depositional landforms,drawing on the older geological record, according due attention to theexciting recent developments in research on the marine environment,incorporating illustrations from both contemporary and ancientenvironments and covering all relevant parts of the world, thisattractive book will find a wide readership among students ofgeography, geology and environmental science.