Are there avalanches on the surface of glaciers?

As long as the glacier’s surface has a slope, it can happen. An avalanche is simply the action of snow falling down a steep slope, and a lot of it all at once. While we tend to hear of avalanches more frequently on mountains, don’t discount a glacier. It can get in on the action if it wants to.

For example, Lirung Glacier had an avalanche in 2014. This glacier is located in Langtang Valley, Nepal. It’s in the Himalayan mountains, so there’s a possibility the avalanche started on a mountain, but nonetheless, the glacier had an avalanche!

There are other avalanches that have taken place on glaciers, but they aren’t as “exciting” for the news anchors to cover since hardly anyone lives close enough to a glacier to be in danger.

An avalanche is a fall of snow on a downward path. To have an avalanche, you need a slope, so they occur on a mountainous mass. Can this be a glacier? Well, there was just such a one this last January in Tibet, a mega-avalanche, and the slope was not at all steep; furthermore, there was a second such avalanche shortly afterwards and nearby.

In fact, these were highly unusual slippages of the entire glacial cap, the most dangerous type of avalanche where the flow is of sheets or plates of ice rather than of snow. Fortunately, the area being remote, loss of life was minimal. This does not take away the size and phenomenon of such avalanches, caused by moisture forming deep down on the surface of the rocks on which the glaciers lay.