4 ms·

Glaciers slide down hill. As they accumulate mass in the accumulation zone, even when it's cold, they are pushed down the hill. So a glacier which is growing in

• saiya-jin 4y ago
  Its on average around 0.5m/day, but could be up to 1m/day. Gravity is too strong force, and they are not tightly bonded to bedrock. I would expect that in hard winter they move much less but still some. That's how they keep discovering dead alpinists (more like parts of them, ie Reinhold Messner's brother Gunther on Nanga Parbat who died there in 1970, I think it was piece of femur bone and shoe) in Alps and Himalaya, everything that falls down on glacier or into crevasse eventually ends up at the snout of glacier (or river flowing from it). Their overall accelerated melting due to climate change just accelerates all this since glaciers retreat higher and higher.
• misja111 4y ago
  Yes it flows downhill, but as long as ice is accumulated in the accumulation zone, which is in the upper region of the glacier, the downflowing part is filled up by new ice from above. By the way the article doesn't say that the veins were uncovered by the advancing glacier, it says the opposite, the advancing glacier covered them.