How to Use subglacial in a Sentence

subglacial

adjective
  • The study says the subglacial lake on Mars is cold indeed, and rather salty.
    — Jay Bennett, Popular Mechanics, 25 July 2018
  • How much ash a subglacial eruption might generate cannot be guessed.
    — Robin Wylie, Discover Magazine, 10 Sep. 2014
  • The cracks had formed as the ice skidded and juddered over a subglacial mountain.
    — National Geographic, 13 June 2018
  • The team now plans to look at how active subglacial lakes influence the flow of ice in the upper layers of the ice sheet.
    — Jason Daley, Smithsonian, 27 June 2019
  • The salt from rocks beneath the ice made the subglacial lakes four to five times saltier than seawater, or hypersaline.
    — Julissa Treviño, Smithsonian, 16 Apr. 2018
  • These eyes in the sky also look for ponds of surface meltwater, conduits that carry seasonal drainage and subglacial lakes.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 19 Apr. 2022
  • That’s not too salty to host microbial life, as a similarly briny subglacial lake in Antarctica proves.
    — Sid Perkins, Science | AAAS, 11 Apr. 2018
  • This new research on the subglacial river used radar data from aircraft flying over Antarctica.
    — WIRED, 8 Nov. 2022
  • Even on cold planets far from their stars, liquid water can exist beneath thick ice layers, as subglacial lakes or through internal heating.
    — Victoria Corless, Space.com, 29 Jan. 2026
  • Olivas points out that microbes could be living throughout the large subglacial lake because of the high levels of life-sustaining compounds.
    — David Kindy, Smithsonian Magazine, 23 July 2021
  • What do the subglacial lakes mean for the future of the Greenland Ice Sheet given the looming threat of climate change?
    — NBC News, 29 June 2019
  • These rivers of subglacial water run beneath most Antarctic glaciers, including Thwaites.
    — WIRED, 27 Oct. 2023
  • In that scenario, crevasses would open up in the glacial ice during the summer, allowing water to pour down to the bedrock, supercharging the subglacial hydrology.
    — WIRED, 8 Nov. 2022
  • Scientists first unearthed evidence of these subglacial reservoirs in 2018.
    — Jennifer Leman, Popular Mechanics, 30 Sep. 2020
  • Those differences allow the scientists to map subglacial topography.
    — Daniela Hernandez, WSJ, 29 Dec. 2018
  • Accordingly, the subglacial water must be at least negative 10 degrees Celsius.
    — Jay Bennett, Popular Mechanics, 25 July 2018
  • Earth's subglacial lakes are teeming with bacterial life, and similar life might survive in liquid reservoirs on Mars, scientists have speculated.
    — NBC News, 28 Sep. 2020
  • The temperature of this water would probably have remained just above freezing, the researchers theorize, a bit like the Antarctic subglacial lakes on Earth that are covered in ice year-round.
    — Popular Science, 29 June 2020
  • Along with the sensing system, the probe is designed to release a small, autonomous vehicle that probes the subglacial reservoir and can further investigate points of interest, such as hydrothermal vents.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 4 Mar. 2024
  • Previously, this method has found subglacial lakes in Antartica, Greenland, and the Canadian Arctic.
    — Mark Zastrow, Discover Magazine, 28 Sep. 2020
  • Reducing the weight of ice sheets and glaciers in the Arctic has been found to decrease hydrostatic pressure on subglacial hydrate reservoirs, which can then enhance subglacial flux and methane discharge on the coast, according to the paper.
    — Julia Jacobo, ABC News, 11 Oct. 2025
  • In Iceland, after the subglacial volcano Katla has been erupting constantly for a whole year, Gríma is still looking for her missing sister who disappeared the day the eruption started.
    — Jacob Siegal, BGR, 13 June 2021
  • Getting a comparable subglacial sample today using modern drilling technology would have been prohibitively expensive.
    — Gemma Tarlach, Wired, 20 Mar. 2021
  • There are also the many scientific breakthroughs made by women in the Antarctic, from discovering a series of active subglacial lakes to initiating the use of autonomous ocean gliders to take ocean measurements in tough-to-reach waters.
    — Laura Kiniry, Smithsonian Magazine, 25 Mar. 2022
  • Similar environments on Earth, such as Antarctica’s subglacial lakes, support microbial life, demonstrating that surface liquid water is not the only possible habitat.
    — Victoria Corless, Space.com, 29 Jan. 2026
  • Examples include Julia Christmann’s PhD work on the calving of ice shelves, and another degree project that modeled the evolution of the subglacial channels that carry meltwater from the surface to the ice base.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 27 Jan. 2023
  • So far Fagradalsfjall’s eruption has not caused the kind of global disruption to air travel seen in 2010, when the subglacial volcano Eyjafjallajökull spewed volcanic ash into the high atmosphere.
    — Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic, 23 Mar. 2021
  • The core was subglacial sediment and rock, taken from below a mile of ice in 1966 at Camp Century, an American research base in Greenland that had served as cover for a secret—and failed—military project.
    — Star Tribune, 21 Mar. 2021
  • Mikucki, Tulaczyk and Doran are using the Dreamcatcher and on-the-ground measurements of the chemical properties of subglacial water to gain knowledge about ice-sheet behavior and Antarctic habitats never before gleaned from the continent’s ice.
    — Daniela Hernandez, WSJ, 29 Dec. 2018
  • To create the most detailed map of Antarctica's subglacial topography yet, a team of researchers led by Helen Ockenden, of the University of Edinburgh and the Institut des Geosciences de l'Environnement in France, applied a modeling technique known as Ice Flow Perturbation Analysis (IFPA).
    — Stefanie Waldek, Space.com, 15 Jan. 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'subglacial.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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