Mondo Knows Facts
Glaciers carry boulders far from their bedrock
Erratics are rocks dumped many miles from any outcrop of the same stone Ice plucks blocks from one valley and leaves them somewhere else entirely when it melts. Matching an erratic to its source rock shows which way an old ice sheet flowed and how far it reached. The Big Rock near Okotoks in Alberta is a well known example, carried roughly 400 kilometres. It sits in Mondo's world geography collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
Where this comes from
Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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More facts like this
Fjords are glacial valleys that the sea floodedIce cut the valleys below sea level, and when it melted the ocean moved inPerito Moreno is one of few stable glaciersWhile most glaciers shrink, this one advances and dams a lake until the ice gives wayIce cores trap ancient air for studyBubbles sealed in glacier ice preserve samples of the atmosphere from thousands of years agoThe Rwenzori has glaciers almost on the equatorThese peaks on the Uganda and Congo border carry ice despite sitting within a degree of the EquatorBlood Falls in Antarctica flows with crimson iron-rich waterEmerging from the Taylor Glacier, the waterfall gets its deep red colour from oxidised iron.Antarctica holds Earth's largest single ice sheetIt covers the whole continent and holds roughly sixty per cent of the world's fresh water
🗺️ World Geographyfact 128 of 200
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Tags: glaciers, geology, erosion
Glaciers carry boulders far from their bedrock: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Erratics are rocks dumped many miles from any outcrop of the same stone. The figure is taken from British Geological Survey, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a world geography fact?
- Yes. It sits on the World Geography shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.