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Glaciers or ice sheets are natural accumulations of ice possessing in trinsic motion, which have appeared on the Earth's land surface as a result of the accumulation and transformation of precipitation [2]. Only a very small portion of the surface of the land is now covered by glaciers, and at low latitudes they are found justat high elevations, on mountain slopes. However, glaciers are known to play very important roles in shaping the topography of the Earth, in determiningits past, present, and future climate, and in creating the state of the world Ocean. Recently there has also been a marked increase in the practical value of our knowledge about glaciers, as a part of the human habitat and as a factor affecting the economy. Interest in glaciers on other planets is also growing. Voyages of spacecraft to Jupiter, for instance, have shown that some Jovian satellites possess ice sheets tens of kilometers in thickness.
List of contents
1: Observations of the Thermal Regime of Glaciers.- 1.1. Measurements of Temperatures Inside Glaciers.- 1.2. Sources of Errors During Temperature Measurements in Glacier Boreholes.- 2: Thermal Drilling of Glaciers.- 2.1. The Theory of Drilling by Contact with a Heated Solid Surface.- 2.2. Methods of Thermal Drilling of Ice.- 2.3. Antifreeze Thermal Drilling by Direct Contact with a Solid Heater.- 3: The Theory of the Thermal Regime of Glaciers.- 3.1. The Fundamental Equations and Conditions Describing the State of a Glacier.- 3.2. Equations of Motion of Viscoplastic Ice.- 3.3. Internal Heat Sources Created by Ice Motion.- 3.4. Uniqueness Conditions.- 3.5. Simplifying the Equations. Dimensionless Numbers..- 4: The Temperature Field in a Flat Two-Dimensional Glacier With Block Sliding.- 4.1. A General Expression for the Temperature Field. Kinematics of a Glacier..- 4.2. Accurate Solutions for the Temperature Field.- 4.3. Mean Temperature of a Glacier.- 4.4. Temperature Gradients in the Glacier Interior.- 4.5. The Effect of the Dissipation Function.- 5: Approximate Methods for Studying the Temperature Field in a Flat Two-Dimensional Glacier With Block Sliding.- 5.1. The Method of Polynomials.- 5.2. The Temperature Field in a Glacier with a Varying Surface Temperature.- 6: The Thermal Regime of Glaciers.- 6.1. Thermophysical Studies of Accumulation-Ablation at the Upper and Lower Surfaces of Glaciers.- 6.2. Boundary Conditions at the Lower Surface of an Inland Glacier.- 6.3. Heat Sources Participating in the Heat Balance at the Bottom of a Glacier.- 7: The Thermal Regime of Inland Ice Caps.- 7.1. The Thermal Regime of the Antarctic Ice Sheet.- 7.2. Numerical Modeling of the Temperature Field of an Ice Cap.- 8: The Thermal Regime of Mountain Glaciers.- 8.1. The Melting of aContaminated Glacier Surface.- 8.2. Water in Mountain Glaciers.- 9: The Thermophysics of Ice Shelves.- 9.1. Melting at the Bottom of an Ice Shelf.- 9.2. Freezing at the Bottom of an Ice Shelf.- 9.3. Thermophysical Studies of Melting and Freezing at the Bottom of the Ross Ice Shelf.- 10: Applications of the Thermophysics of Glaciers.- 10.1. The Thermal Pollution of Ice Caps with Heat-Emitting Industrial Wastes.- 10.2. Reconstruction of the Quaternary Inland Ice Sheet of Europe.- References.
