page_title: Glacial series
section_title: Glacial series in the Alpine Foreland
hierarchical_section_title: Glacial series / Glacial series in the Alpine Foreland
context_page_description: The glacial series refers to a particular sequence of landforms in Central Europe that were formed during the Pleistocene glaciation beneath the ice sheets, along their margins and on their forelands during each glacial advance.
context_section_description: The Alpine glaciers, that formed a network of ice streams during the high points of the ice ages, repeatedly flowed beyond the boundary of the Alps and advanced into the Alpine Foreland. There they formed vast foreland glaciers. In this Alpine Foreland glaciation, Penck identified a number of landforms: the ground moraines, the Zungenbecken, the terminal moraines and the gravel plains in front of them.
  The bowl-shaped basins, which were formed by the scouring of the ground by the glacier, were called Zungenbecken ("tongue basins"), because the tongue or snout of the glacier was once located here. In these basins, if there was no outlet, glacial lakes (Gletscherrandseen or Zungenbeckenstauseen) were formed during the retreat of the glacier. There is a number of lakes of this type in the Salzkammergut, for example. Typical landforms within the Zungenbecken of the Alpine Foreland are drumlins, but there are rarely any tunnel valleys. Around the  Zungenbecken on the edge of the former ice sheet, are ridges of glacial till known as terminal moraines.
  Till is the material that makes up ground, lateral and (not always present) medial moraines. Ground moraine consists of material that was once beneath the glacier and was transported by it and deposited across wide areas of the former glacier bed. The lateral moraines comprise that eroded material which is carried  along at the sides of a glacier. A lateral moraine that is no longer being actively added to with glacial material because the glacier has retreated for climatic reasons, is known as a flank moraine. In the Alps the remaining flank moraines were usually formed during the Little Ice Age in medieval times. They lie several metres higher than the present glacier surface and extend far beyond the present glacier snouts. Medial moraines are formed when the lateral moraines of two glaciers are combined when they flow together.
  On the far side of the morainic zone is the gravel outwash plain, which was piled up by the meltwaters of the ice mass. Those waters usually came from glacier caves whose former location is still recognisable today from the dips in the level of the terminal moraines. Often the gravel plains are markedly terraced; younger outlets have cut so-called little trumpet-shaped valleys in the older gravel plains. The material of the outwash plans is glacial till. The transport capacity of the meltwater is considerably less than that of the glacier, so that larger rocks cannot be carried out of the Zungenbecken. By contrast, elements with smaller grain size, like clays and sands can be transported much further, which is why they are rarely found in the gravel plains.
  Glacial meltwater valleys (Urstromtäler) emerged as a result of meltwater flowing away in a direction parallel to the edge of the ice mass and are a feature of Northern Central Europe. These valleys, created by glacial meltwaters, do not appear in the Alpine Foreland as they do, for example, in North Germany because their function was assumed by the great rivers that already existed in the region - the Danube, Rhine, Rhône and Po - or their tributaries, which transported away the meltwaters of the glaciers.
caption: Following glaciation (schematic representation)
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