Landforms produced by mountain glaciers Cirques - bowl shaped depressions that occur at the heads of mountain glaciers that result form a combination of frost wedging, glacial plucking, and abrasion. Sometimes small lakes, called tarns occur in the bottom of cirque. If two adjacent valleys are filled with glacial ice, the ridges between the valleys can be carved into a sharp knife-edge ridge, called an ar te. Hanging Valleys - When a glacier occupying a smaller tributary valley meets the larger valley, the tributary glacier usually does not have the ability to erode its base to the floor of the main valley. Thus, when the glacial ice melts the floor of the tributary valley hangs above the floor of the main valley and is called a hanging valley.
Waterfalls generally occur where the hanging valley meets the main valley.
Fjords - Fjords are narrow inlets along the seacoast that were once occupied by a valley glacier, called a fjord glacier. The same small-scale abrasional features such as striations and glacial polish can occur beneath ice caps and ice sheets, particularly in temperate environments. The glacier can carry this material on its surface or embedded within it. Thus, sediment transportation in a glacier is very much different than that in a stream. Thus, sediments deposited directly from melting of a glacial can range from very poorly sorted to better sorted, depending on how much water transport takes place after the ice melts.