Difference between Glaciers and Icebergs

What are Glaciers?

Glaciers are big bodies of moving ice. Generally, glaciers form on land and they are formed when the snow falls on land and gets compressed for a longer duration of time. (centuries). Due to the gravitational pull, they move towards the down surface of the land.

Polar region constitutes one of the world’s largest glaciers. In the mountain regions the glaciers can be found near the equator. A glacier can be of 100 years old or it

can be of 1000 years old. Most of the current glaciers were formed during the last ice age.
Due to human activities such as release of toxic gases from the factories and release of excess carbon dioxide from the vehicles and many more the glaciers are melting and the temperature of the earth is rising even at the poles. In some years some animals like polar bears who live in cold habitat may become extinct due to rise in temperature at the poles.

Three basic types of glaciers
• Mountain glaciers
Ice bodies covering the surface of the mountain are called mountain glaciers. It forms when the snow starts to accumulate in a particular area and every year a new layer of snow accumulates at the same area and later it transforms into ice hence creating mountain glaciers.
• Valley glaciers
A valley is a long area running between mountains and hills is called a valley and when the process of glaciation takes place in the valley the valley glaciers are formed.
• Rock glaciers
A rock glacier is a mass which constitutes mass of snow, ice, rock, and mud. Due to the influence of gravity, it moves slowly downwards from the mountain.

What is Iceberg?

A freely floating piece of freshwater ice in open water that has been broken of a glacier is called an iceberg. It may form in a lake or it may float in a lake and it may also form in ocean or it may also float in the ocean.

An average ice has an height of three to sixteen feet above sea level.
A question might have arrived in your mind that can we get drinkable water from an iceberg?
And the answer is yes you can get fresh drinking water from an iceberg. You might have thought that iceberg is found in salty ocean so how can it be used as drinking water?

The iceberg floats in ocean but it is not formed from the ocean water as it comprises of compressed snow. Although iceberg is not used a source of drinking water because there is a big risk involved in moving them and of course of the cost involved.

How are iceberg and glaciers different?

Many people get difference between iceberg and glacier and they do not know the difference between iceberg and glaciers. The main difference is that a glacier is a massive ice body generally formed on land and covers vast area whereas an iceberg is a piece of freshwater ice which gets broken or separated from a glacier and it moves freely in the ocean water.

Iceberg are small chunks of ice which gets separated from the glaciers. You can drink water by melting iceberg because they not old as glaciers they are just a chunk of ice broken up from the glaciers which were formed by the compressed snow.

I would not advise you to drink glacier water because the water may appear clean but might be contaminated by microscopic parasite or inorganic or organic pollutants.

So, your health might be at risk if you consume melted glacier water. If you avoid glacier water it might be the best decision you ever made because you simply can tell weather the water is contaminated or not by just looking at it or by tasting it.

It requires a lab test to detect weather the water is contaminated or not. Although all the glacier water is not unsafe to drink but it is advised not to drink glacier water because you never know what it might contain.
Sometimes when tourists go for hiking in glaciers.

They poop over there and the poop is then preserved by the ice and as the poops gets preserved its close to impossible for it to get decomposed over there and the glacier starts getting contaminated by the bacteria present in human poop. The Kahlitna Glacier has got approx. 34000 climbers since 1970 and the visitors released over 66 metric tons of poop over there.