Melville Glacier (Greenland)

Melville Glacier (Danish: Melville Gletscher), is a glacier in northwestern Greenland.[2] Administratively it belongs to the Avannaata municipality.

This article is about the glacier in NW Greenland. For the glacier in Antarctica, see Melville Glacier.
Melville Glacier
Melville Gletscher
Location within Greenland
TypeTidal outlet glacier
LocationGreenland
Coordinates77°44′N 66°39′W
Width2 km (1.2 mi)
TerminusInglefield Fjord
Baffin Bay
StatusRetreating[1]

This glacier was named by Robert Peary after Chief Engineer George W. Melville (1841 – 1912), Chief of the Bureau of Steam Engineering.[3]

Geography

The Melville Glacier discharges from the Greenland Ice Sheet and has its terminus in the northern side of the head of the Inglefield Fjord just north of Josephine Peary Island. Its last stretch lies between two nunataks: Mount Lee in the east separates it from the Farquhar Glacier to the east, and Mount Asserson, in the west, separates it from the Sharp Glacier to the west.[2]

The Melville Glacier flows roughly from NE to SW. In the same manner as its neighboring glaciers, it has retreated by approximately 1 km (0.62 mi) in the period between the 1980s and 2014.[1]

Map of Northwestern Greenland
19th century map of the Inglefield Gulf.

See also

References
  1. Ice front and flow speed variations of marine-terminating outlet glaciers along the coast of Prudhoe Land, northwestern Greenland
  2. "Melville Gletscher". Mapcarta. Retrieved 31 March 2019.
  3. Robert Neff Keely, Gwilym George Davis, In Arctic Seas: the Voyage of the Kite with the Peary Expedition, 2011 p. 373
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