Crossword clues for ice cap
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Wiktionary
alt. A permanent expanse of ice encompassing a large geographical area, e.g. in Earth's polar zones or at high elevation. n. A permanent expanse of ice encompassing a large geographical area, e.g. in Earth's polar zones or at high elevation.
WordNet
n. a mass of ice and snow that permanently covers a large area of land (e.g., the polar regions or a mountain peak) [syn: icecap]
Wikipedia
An ' ice cap' is an ice mass that covers less than 50,000 km² of land area (usually covering a highland area). Larger ice masses covering more than 50,000 km² are termed ice sheets.
Ice caps are not constrained by topographical features (i.e., they will lie over the top of mountains). By contrast, ice masses of similar size that are constrained by topographical features are known as ice fields. The dome of an ice cap is usually centred on the highest point of a massif. Ice flows away from this high point (the ice divide) towards the ice cap's periphery.
Ice caps have significant effects on the geomorphology of the area they occupy. Plastic moulding, gouging and other glacial erosional features become present upon the glacier's retreat. Many lakes, such as the Great Lakes in North America, as well as numerous valleys have been formed by glacial action over hundreds of thousands of years.
On Earth, there are about 30 million km³ of total ice mass. The average temperature of an ice mass ranges between −20 °C and −30 °C. The core of an ice cap exhibits a constant temperature that ranges between −15 °C and −20 °C.
A high-latitude region covered in ice, though strictly not an ice cap (since they exceed the maximum area specified in the definition above), are called polar ice caps; the usage of this designation is widespread in the mass media and arguably recognized by experts. Vatnajökull is an example of an ice cap in Iceland.
Usage examples of "ice cap".
May be anywhere, he may even have thrown it away on the ice cap, though I think that unlikely.
Fd seen it before and it wasn't much to look at but it was a sight a man never got used to, not because of itself but because of what it represented: the beginning of the polar ice cap that covered the top of the world, at this time of year a solid, compacted mass of ice that stretched clear from where we lay right across to Alaska on the other side of the world.
On the sixth night after the raid on Senzeni Na, however, around the end of the timeslip, the frosty ground ahead became a pure white line, which thickened on the horizon, and then came clear of it: the white cliffs of the southern polar ice cap.
If you go far enough south during the summer, on the permanent ice, you see the soot the Clarke people are spreading on the ice cap.
A diapir was nothing more than a blob of warm ice, heated by the vents and gravitational hot zones far below, rising through the Epsom-salt sea toward the ice cap that had once covered 100 percent of Europa and which now, two thousand e-years after the cryobot arbeiter company arrived, still covered more than 98 percent of the moon.
Does it not clearly suggest that the ice cap, estimated to have been at its maximum at least a mile thick in Ohio, disappeared from Delaware County in that state within only a few centuries?