Melville Glacier (), is a

glacier A glacier (; or ) is a persistent body of dense ice, a form of rock, that is constantly moving downhill under its own weight. A glacier forms where the accumulation of snow exceeds its ablation over many years, often centuries. It acquires ...

in northwestern

Greenland Greenland is an autonomous territory in the Danish Realm, Kingdom of Denmark. It is by far the largest geographically of three constituent parts of the kingdom; the other two are metropolitan Denmark and the Faroe Islands. Citizens of Greenlan ...

. Administratively it belongs to the

Avannaata Avannaata (, ) is a municipality of Greenland created on 1 January 2018 from the bulk of the former Qaasuitsup municipality. It encompasses an area of 522,700 km2 and has 10,726 inhabitants. Geography In the south, Avannaata is flanked ...

municipality. This glacier was named by Robert Peary after Chief Engineer George W. Melville (1841 – 1912), Chief of the Bureau of Steam Engineering.Robert Neff Keely, Gwilym George Davis, ''In Arctic Seas: the Voyage of the Kite with the Peary Expedition,'' 2011 p. 373

Geography

The Melville Glacier discharges from the

Greenland Ice Sheet The Greenland ice sheet is an ice sheet which forms the second largest body of ice in the world. It is an average of thick and over thick at its maximum. It is almost long in a north–south direction, with a maximum width of at a latitude ...

and has its terminus in the northern side of the head of the Inglefield Fjord just north of Josephine Peary Island. Its last stretch lies between two

nunatak A nunatak (from Inuit language, Inuit ) is the summit or ridge of a mountain that protrudes from an ice field or glacier that otherwise covers most of the mountain or ridge. They often form natural pyramidal peaks. Isolated nunataks are also cal ...

s: Mount Lee in the east separates it from the

Farquhar Glacier Farquhar Glacier (), is a glacier in northwestern Greenland. Administratively it belongs to the Avannaata municipality. This glacier was named by Robert Peary after Commodore Norman von Heldreich Farquhar, Farquhar (1840 – 1907), Chief of the B ...

to the east, and Mount Asserson, in the west, separates it from the

Sharp Glacier Sharp Glacier is a glacier flowing north to the head of Lallemand Fjord, close east of the Boyle Mountains, in Graham Land. Mapped by Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey The Falkland Islands and Dependencies Aerial Survey Expedition (FIDASE) ...

to the west. The Melville Glacier flows roughly from NE to SW. In the same manner as its neighboring glaciers, it has retreated by approximately in the period between the 1980s and 2014.Ice front and flow speed variations of marine-terminating outlet glaciers along the coast of Prudhoe Land, northwestern Greenland
/ref>

References

External links

Identifying Spatial Variability in Greenland's Outlet Glacier Response to Ocean HeatThe recent regimen of the ice cap margin in North Greenland
Glaciers of Greenland {{Greenland-glacier-stub

Geography

See also

References

External links