A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
975 entries
icefall
A steep, heavily crevassed section of a glacier where the ice flows over a cliff or sharp increase in gradient and fractures into a chaotic maze of seracs, crevasses, and unstable ice towers. An icefall is a waterfall made of ice, still moving but shattered by the terrain beneath it. The Khumbu Icefall on Everest is the most famous and most feared.
Etymology
Compound of “ice” + “fall” — direct English descriptive term, modeled on “waterfall,” for the glacial equivalent.