Fascinating Glacier Facts

• 10% of the land area of the World is made up of glaciers (over 15,000,000 square kilometres)

• The ice in glaciers is over 4,200 metres thick in some places.

• The ice crystals in a glacier can be as big as a hockey or cricket ball.

• Glaciers contain about 75% of all the freshwater in the World and if the ice melted, sea level would rise by about 70 metres.

• The largest glacier in the World is 204 Kilometres long (Bering glacier in Alaska).

• Glacial ice looks blue because years of compression makes it dense and squeezes out the air which means the ice absorbs all the other colours in the spectrum and reflects mainly blue. Glacial ice that is white still contains air bubbles.

Facts taken and edited from www.nsidc.org/glaciers/quickfacts.html