A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1083 entries
aufeis
A sheet of layered ice that builds through the winter on a river valley floor, formed when groundwater or river water is forced up through cracks and freezes on top of ground that is already frozen, over and over. It can run meters thick and fill a valley bottom, and it lasts well into summer — rafters on arctic rivers sometimes find the water disappearing into an ice cave ahead of them. It also does real ecological work: The melt sustains flow into late summer, and caribou climb onto it to get away from insects.
Etymology
German, ice on top. The Baltic German naturalist Alexander von Middendorff introduced the term in 1859 after describing the phenomenon in northern Siberia, and it lodged in the scientific literature untranslated. English’s homegrown terms are icing and, in Alaska, simply overflow — and the plain one is what people who actually live with it say.
Notes
Where aufeis melts out, it leaves ground nearly bare of vascular plants, because it stayed covered through most of the growing season. Those are aufeis barrens, or aufeis glades. On satellite imagery, the same fields reappear in the same places year after year, which makes them a usable clue to where the groundwater is coming up.