The Collaborative International Dictionary
Nunatak \Nu"na*tak\, n.; pl. -taks(the pl. form Nunatakker is Swedish). [Eskimo nun[ae]ttak.] In Greenland, an insular hill or mountain surrounded by an ice sheet.
Wiktionary
alt. A mountain top or rocky element of a ridge that is surrounded by glacial ice but is not covered by ice; a peak protruding from the surface ice sheet. n. A mountain top or rocky element of a ridge that is surrounded by glacial ice but is not covered by ice; a peak protruding from the surface ice sheet.
Wikipedia
A nunatak (from Inuit nunataq) is an exposed, often rocky element of a ridge, mountain, or peak not covered with ice or snow within (or at the edge of) an ice field or glacier. They are also called glacial islands.
The term is typically used in areas where a permanent ice sheet is present. Nunataks present readily identifiable landmark reference points in glaciers or ice caps and are often named.
Lifeforms on nunataks are frequently isolated by the surrounding ice or glacier, creating unique habitats. Nunataks are generally angular and jagged because of freeze-thaw weathering and contrast strongly with the softer contours of the glacially eroded land after a glacier retreats. Although nunataks are not covered in glacial ice, snow can accumulate on them.
The word is of Greenlandic origin and has been used in English since the 1870s.
Nunatak was the British Antarctic Survey’s (BAS) Rothera Research Station’s house band. The five person indie rock band was part of a science team investigating climate change and evolutionary biology on the Antarctic Peninsula. They are chiefly known for their participation in Live Earth in 2007, where they were the only band to play in the event's Antarctica concert.
Usage examples of "nunatak".
But in one place a nunatak about 250 feet high stood out in front of the precipice, and the ascent of this offered no great difficulty.
We very soon put our things together, and came down the nunatak even more quickly.
The nunatak was a bowl of black rock and green life under a blue-white sky.
Even after so long in the nunatak, such behaviors still charmed and fascinated him.
Longtusk turned, looking back over the nunatak and the life sheltered there.
This rocky height, windswept bare of ice like the crater rim, was one of the highest points in the nunatak, so high it seemed he could see the curve of the Earth itself.
It was just as it had been when he had argued with Milkbreath, his own mother, trying to convince her that the flight in search of the nunatak was necessary.
Willow on his back snoring softly, Longtusk, with stiff arthritic limbs, picked his cautious way down off the nunatak rocks.
That day when he announced we had to leave the nunatak, and he took aside you and my mother, Horsetail.
They climbed on to the ice-cap a little south of Cape Bismarck, and, keeping the nunataks of Dronning Louises Land on their left, travelled for five days on tolerable ice in good weather, with few bergs to surmount and no crevasses to delay them.
A gale blew from the north while he was among a chain of nunataks glazed into black ice, where the going was hard.
Worst of all he suffered from distressing fits of light-headedness, during which every ice-fall became an Alpine peak and the nunataks danced like dervishes around him.
Seracs reared like fortresses, aretes and nunataks traced in black the shape of buried mountains behind the green-white blister of the ice.
About three o'clock in the morning, still following the flag trail that stretched out interminably before us in the long rake of the headlights, we felt the tractor slow down and Jackstraw, who was driving at the time, change gear as we entered on the first gentle slope of the long foothills that led to the winding pass that cut the Vindeby Nunataks almost exactly in half.
Far away to the south-west we could see the jagged saw-tooth line of the Vindeby Nunataks - that hundred-mile long ridge of hills that we would have to cross the next day - the forbidding peaks a gleaming crystalline white in the light of the moon that had not yet topped our eastern horizon.