Ice Tongue

An ice tongue is a long, narrow strip of floating glacier ice that projects seaward from a fast-flowing outlet or valley glacier past its grounding line into open water, unconfined by embayment walls. Examples include the Erebus and Drygalski ice tongues in the Ross Sea. Ice tongues form where a glacier discharges faster than calving and melt remove ice, so the floating extension survives for years. They are fragile: lateral rifts, ocean swell, and basal melt episodically calve large tabular icebergs from the terminus. Because they float, their loss does not directly raise sea level, but they record glacier velocity and submarine melt at the front.