Real Glaciers Eat Rocks Glaciers have the ability to completely transform a landscape. As the ice advanced over the land it plowed through the existing rock and soil and created most of the landforms that we see today. Not only can glaciers and ice sheets erode the surface of the earth but they can also deposit sediments. This is a close up image of striations.
Striations are erosional features.
As this basal ice moves over top of bedrock it scrapes the bedrock and leaves striations, or grooves behind. Geologists use these markings to infer the direction of ice motion. In this picture, the movement of ice could be either from the left to the right or from the right to the left. On close inspection of these grooves, you can sometimes see that one end of the striation is more shallow than the other, so that in cross section the striation would be deeper at one end than the other. The deposits that the glacier leaves behind are a mixture of all of the different materials that it eroded.