glacier
part of speech
noun (a glacier, glaciers)
meaning for a pupil
1) A glacier is a huge, thick mass of ice that moves very slowly over land, like a frozen river. tree →
2) Glaciers form where more snow falls each year than melts, so the snow piles up and presses into ice. tree →
sense in the lessons
In science and geography glaciers appear in lessons about ice ages, mountains, valleys and climate change: they carve U-shaped valleys, carry rocks, and many are shrinking as the world warms. They store much of the world's fresh water. Phrases: «glacier melt», «retreating glacier», «glacier valley», «glacier ice».
examples
- A glacier moves only a few centimetres or metres a day. tree →
- We saw a glacier on our trip to New Zealand. tree →
- Long ago, glaciers covered much of Canada and northern Britain. tree →
- The glacier carved a wide U-shaped valley. tree →
- Many glaciers are melting because the climate is getting warmer. tree →
- Icebergs break off glaciers that reach the sea. tree →
- Walking on a glacier is dangerous because of hidden cracks called crevasses. tree →
- Our teacher showed photos of the same glacier fifty years apart. tree →
- They had only one more glacier to climb. tree →
note
Countable: «a glacier», «two glaciers». Pronounced GLAY-see-er (UK also GLASS-ee-er). Adjective: «glacial» (also means very cold or very slow). Not the same as an iceberg (a piece floating in the sea) or an ice sheet (covering a whole land area, like Antarctica).
In the corpora
- A glacier is a river of ice.
- A glacier is a huge mass of ice that slowly flows downhill under its own weight.
- Today two great ice sheets cover Greenland and Antarctica and hold about 99% of the world's glacier ice.
- Glaciers carve wide valleys with flat floors and steep sides, called U-shaped valleys.
- Glaciers dropped huge boulders, called erratics, far from the rocks they came from.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «glacier» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.