A-Level Geography: Glacial Systems and Landscapes

Glaciated landscapes are one of the optional physical landscapes in A level Geography, offered for example as 'Glacial systems and landscapes' by AQA and 'Glaciated landscapes' by OCR. This material follows the systems approach the specifications use: a glacier as a store of ice with inputs and outputs, and a landscape as the record of what that system did.

You begin with the glacial budget. Accumulation adds snow and ice, ablation removes it, and the equilibrium line separates the zone of net gain from the zone of net loss. You calculate an annual net balance and a cumulative balance over several years, and reason about what a rising equilibrium line means for a glacier in a warming climate, including why the snout responds with a time lag even though the ice keeps flowing forward.

Next comes the base of the glacier, which controls almost everything else. Warm-based glaciers sit at the pressure melting point, slide on meltwater and erode actively by abrasion and plucking; cold-based glaciers are frozen to their beds, move mainly by internal deformation and erode little. You also meet extensional and compressional flow and how they respond to changes in gradient.

The landform questions describe features in words so that you learn their diagnostic characteristics: a roche moutonnée smoothed on one side and plucked on the other, truncated spurs and a hanging valley in a U-shaped trough, a drumlin with its blunt end facing up-ice, an esker winding across the valley floor, a kame at the old ice margin, and the kettle holes and outwash plains of a meltwater landscape. A key skill is telling till, which ice deposits unsorted, from fluvioglacial sediment, which meltwater sorts, layers and rounds.

The material offers a quiz with explanations, flashcards for landforms and processes, a printable written sheet of explanations to practise extended answers, and an oral exam in which an examiner asks one question at a time and gives brief feedback at the end. Periglacial processes and the human use of cold environments are covered in a separate material in this category.

• Calculate and interpret annual and cumulative glacial mass balance
• Explain how the equilibrium line responds to climate change
• Compare warm-based and cold-based glaciers and their movement and erosion
• Explain extensional and compressional flow, abrasion and plucking
• Identify erosional, depositional and fluvioglacial landforms from their characteristics
• Distinguish till from fluvioglacial sediment

Practice material written by Zestly, based on board specifications for the glaciated landscapes option, such as AQA A-level Geography 7037, section 3.1.4 (Glacial systems and landscapes), and the DfE GCE AS and A level subject content for geography (landscape systems).