What causes ice crystals to be squashed together on a glacier?

What causes them to be scouched? The fact that ice is very dense and gravity. Snow on top of more snow eventually makes ice. Some air gets in with snow too. What causes glaciers to form is simply more snow in the winter than what can melt in spring, summer, and fall. This would have to happen year after year after…. read more

Glacier ice is built up from many individual ice crystals that are packed closely together. In the top of an ice sheet the ice crystals are randomly oriented because the snow flakes have settled randomly. Some crystals are oriented favorably for basal gliding and others are not. This means that the deformation proceeds much more slowly than for a single ice crystal. read more