Cirque Floor Geology

Hence it experiences somewhat greater erosion forces and is most often overdeepened below the level of the cirque s low side outlet stage and its down slope backstage valley.

Cirque floor geology.

Cirques are bowl shaped amphitheater like depressions that glaciers carve into mountains and valley sidewalls at high elevations. Corrie combe cwm 1855 robert browning childe roland to the dark tower came in men and women london. Often the glaciers flow up and over the lip of the cirque as gravity drives them downslope. Elias national park alaska sits in a classic bowl shaped cirque.

Author s edition boston mass. True cirque growth only occurs once the thickness of snow patches increases to a point at which glacier ice can form by compaction. Once formed glaciers widen and deepen cirques by subglacial abrasion and quarrying of the hollow floor and lower headwall 3 see diagram below. The floor of the cirque is bowl shaped because of the convergence zones of combining ice flows from a different direction and the debris accompanying them.

Circle amphitheatre shaped basin with precipitous walls at the head of a glacial valley it generally results from erosion beneath the bergschrund of a glacier a bergschrund is a large crevasse that lies a short distance from the exposed rock walls and separates the stationary from the moving ice. Geology a curved depression in a mountainside with steep walls forming the end of a valley. In early summer it opens exposing the rock at its base to diurnal. Chapman and hall 193 piccadilly oclc 1561924.

Cirques subjected to seasonal melting often form small lakes. The granite creek tarn wrangell st.