WIDTH AND LENGTH SCALING OF GLACIERS

An analysis of hundreds of mountain and valley glaciers in the former Soviet Union and the Alps shows that characteristic glacier widths sca le as characteristic glacier lengths raised to an exponent of 0.6. Thi s is in contrast to most previous analyses which implicitly or explici tly assumed scaling exponents of either 0 or 1. The exponent 0.6 impli es that average glacier widths are proportional to average glacier thi cknesses. Although this seems to suggest V-shaped glacier valleys, the linear width-thickness relationship is not inconsistent with paraboli c valley cross-sections, because the characteristic (Or average) width of a glacier depends on many other aspects of channel and glacier mor phology, including variations in the channel width with distance up- a nd down-stream.