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Abstract

Ice sheets and glaciers form during long periods from annual snow accumulation exceeding ablation (see Paterson 1999). Ice sheets are large (area more than 50,000 km2) continental ice masses, and in the present Earth such are only the Antarctic and Greenland ice massifs. Smaller long-term accumulations of ice on land are counted as glaciers. The largest of them is the Southern Patagonia ice field in Argentina and Chile, covering an area of 13,000 km2 (Rignot et al. 2003), which is just 0.75 % of the area of Greenland ice sheet.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The concept of glacial lakes includes all lakes with basins formed by glacial erosion.

  2. 2.

    The geological epoch, which started about 12,000 years ago and continues at present.

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Correspondence to Matti Leppäranta .

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© 2015 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Leppäranta, M. (2015). Proglacial Lakes. In: Freezing of Lakes and the Evolution of their Ice Cover. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29081-7_6

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