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Course: MIT+K12 > Unit 1
Lesson 2: Earth and spaceGlaciers with chocolate
Did you know that glaciers hold nearly 2% of Earth's water? Created by MIT+K12.
Want to join the conversation?
- What's the difference between a glacier and ice caps?(5 votes)
- Ice caps - large bodies of more or less stagnant ice at the earth's poles
Glaciers - ice that is moving (flowing)
So an ice cap is a non moving ice form usually at the poles, and the key distinction to define a glacier is that it has to be moving. If a glacier were to stop moving (flowing) then it would be called an ice sheet or an ice field.(12 votes)
- Great video! I've heard that the large glaciers somewhere north are melting, but this video doesn't go over that. When the glaciers melt, do large icebergs break off from the glacier or small ones?(8 votes)
- I think it just depends on the environment around the glacier. Hope this helped :)(4 votes)
- A glacier still does need an incline to move, doesn't it? Uniform pressure won't produce a net force, right?(5 votes)
- Yes, but unlike us pushing an icecube , nothing will 'push' the glacier. All the causes need to be natural.(3 votes)
- What's the difference between glaciers and icebergs(2 votes)
- what form was the chocolate when they put it on there?(2 votes)
- Half-melted, sticky, slushy,not completely solid or liquid.(1 vote)
- How come milk moves faster down and the pudding doesn't?(1 vote)
- I still don't get how glaciers move rocks.Also,what is a glacier?(1 vote)
- a glacier is a large chunk of ice that slowly slides across the land, dragging rocks and soil along with it. (glaciers formed the great lakes, by the way)(2 votes)
- At 5.31, was it the pressure of all that chocolate build up that caused the bottom of the glacier to almost co-laps?(1 vote)
- was the chocolate already a solid or did it become one. Also why is pudding faster to usse(1 vote)
- how does ice be come solid(1 vote)
Video transcript
(machine sounds) (wind blowing)
(waves crashing) - You know, science can be
pretty hard work sometimes. But nature does a lot of work too. Today we're here at Cape Cod to talk about one of nature's coolest workers, glaciers. What makes glaciers so cool? Well, you might know how
water can move rocks and stones around, you know,
small ones like this one. But glaciers can move things that are much, much bigger. How much bigger? Well, how about this? Or this? Or this? That's right, even really
big rocks like this one, can be moved by glaciers. I guess this would be pretty tough to move by myself, huh? (groans) That all begs the question,
what is a glacier? Well, a glacier is a large,
permanent body of ice that forms when snow falls in the winter but doesn't melt in the summer. (machine crushing ice) Over time that ice can
build up, forming a glacier. In fact, it can turn
out to be quite a lot. Glaciers hold nearly 2%
of the Earth's water, which is nearly 200
times the amount held in rivers, lakes, and streams combined. When this ice meets the ocean it can break off, forming icebergs. Which is a big problem if
you happen to have a ship. Titanic, anybody? Ahh. But, does ice move? Well, different materials
flow at different rates and under different conditions. Some materials, like
this milk, flow quickly. Other materials, like this maple syrup, or this chocolate
pudding, flow more slowly. Some materials, like this banana, don't seem to flow at all, that is, unless you put them under enough stress or pressure to make them move. Ice slides, but with enough
pressure it would flow too. Unfortunately, it's a
little difficult to get that much pressure here. But we can demonstrate some of the same processes using chocolate. Here, we've made a model
glacier out of chocolate. We've used cookie crumbs
to represent rocks on the bottom of the glacier, and shaved chocolate to
represent snow and ice. We used chocolate because
it is soft enough to move even under low pressures like this. In this experiment we added chocolate to the top of the glacier every 12 minutes. Once enough chocolate is added, the glacier really gets going. If you look closely, you
can even see crevasses, or cracks, where the top
of glacier broke apart. We did this experiment for six hours, but you can do a shorter
experiment by using pudding. Now we're ready to open
our chocolate glacier. One of the things to
notice is that the pieces down at the bottom are much more solid than the pieces up at the top. This is because the chocolate transformed on its way down the glacier, just like snow transforms into ice. Another thing to notice
is that the pieces of cookie crumb stuck on the
bottom of the chocolate. Glaciers trap rocks on
the bottom of the ice and drag it along as the glacier moves. You'll see even though the cookie crumbs were different sizes,
many of them got stuck on the bottom of the chocolate. So, glaciers drag along different sizes of rocks as they move. Perhaps you can see rocks and sand trapped in a real
glacier, like on the left. Or, you can see the same process happening on a smaller
scale, on the right. That's a snow bank melting
in the parking lot. And because ice, unlike water, doesn't sort rocks by size, glacial deposits have all
different types of rocks, of all different sizes,
all in the same place. So the next time you
see a bunch of big rocks surrounded by smaller rocks,
you should ask yourself, "Could this have been
caused by a glacier?" The answer could be yes. Or not.