Width and length scaling of glaciers

• Published in: Journal of Glaciology
• Main Author: Bahr, David B.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge University Press (CUP) 1997
• Subjects: Journal of Glaciology
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0022143000035164; https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0022143000035164

Abstract An analysis of hundreds of mountain and valley glaciers in the former Soviet Union and the Alps shows that characteristic glacier widths scale as characteristic glacier lengths raised to an exponent of 0.6. This is in contrast to most previous analyses which implicitly of explicitly assumed scaling exponents of either 0 or 1. The exponent 0.6 implies that average glacier widths are proportional to average glacier thicknesses. Although this seems to suggest V-shaped glacier valleys, the linear width-thickness relationship is not inconsistent with parabolic valley cross-sections, because the characteristic (or average) width of a glacier depends on many other aspects of channel and glacier morphology, including variations in the channel width with distance up- and downstream.