the.com/ice field
A glacier's quieter, flatter cousin — ice with nowhere urgent to flow.
means A vast, relatively flat expanse of ice — covering land or sea — that spreads wide rather than channeling downhill like a glacier.
from Straightforward English compounding: 'ice' plus 'field,' the latter carrying its old sense of a broad open expanse (as in 'field of grain' or 'field of vision') rather than a farmed plot. The term emerged in exploration and geography writing, where sailors and surveyors needed plain language for stretches of pack ice or ice sheets too flat and formless to call glaciers or icebergs — so they borrowed 'field' the way they'd describe any wide, open ground, only frozen.
- definition
- Flat ice mass covering mountains, draining into separate glaciers below
- terrain rule
- Forms on relatively level ground, unlike channeled glacial valleys
- famous example
- Patagonian Ice Field is Earth's largest outside polar regions
- shrinking fast
- Many ice fields losing mass rapidly due to climate warming