ABSTRACT
In parts of North America, Europe, and Asia, massive glaciers periodically appeared in colder glacial and thawed in warmer interglacial phases of the Pleistocene climate. This ice of continental dimension reached a massive thickness of 3 km or more at places by slow accretion over thousands of years in glacial phases (Gates, 1976), but thawed rapidly in less than a decade in intervenient interglacial phases of the Pleistocene epoch (Lehman, 1997). These recurrent events eventually culminated in 10,000 years BP, bringing the 2-million-year-old Great Ice Age to a sudden end. The multiple glaciation has modeled the landscape beneath sliding glaciers and the yield of meltwater discharge beneath and beyond the vast expanse of glacier ice.
