Outwash fan

Glacial outwash sediment, Knud Rasmussen Glacier, Greenland.

An outwash fan is a fan-shaped body of sediments deposited by braided streams from a melting glacier. Sediment locked within the ice of the glacier, gets transported by the streams of meltwater, and deposits on the outwash plain, at the terminus of the glacier. The outwash, the sediment transported and deposited by the meltwater and that makes up the fan, is usually poorly sorted due to the short distance traveled before being deposited.

References


This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 1/19/2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.