Glacier was one of the good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.
Article milestones Date Process Result October 27, 2005 Featured article candidate Not promoted December 20, 2005 Good article nominee Listed February 14, 2008 Good article reassessment Delisted
Current status: Delisted good article

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Archive 1

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 2 September 2020 and 4 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): WendyCisneros.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 22:25, 16 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Not only is anthropogenic climate change not a fact, it is not necessary to state it as one. In this case, a simple addition of “Climate scientists believe” or “It is thought” or “Increased co2 levels suggest” to the below listed entry solves the issue. This is not a debate or discussion about Climate Change, just the terms used when stating it. I would prefer someone edit it who worked on the article. Thank you. David

Under the CLIMATE CHANGE section;

“Human activity has caused an increase in greenhouse gases creating a global warming trend,[58] causing these valuable glaciers to melt.” WaveGuidedFunction (talk) 14:37, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry but, anthropogenic climate change has been quite well established as "fact" by the scientists working in the field. Yes, the oil company execs and their buddies are in denial about it - because they might lose a buck or two and $$$ is all they care about. Cheers, Vsmith (talk) 19:18, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

How should the Glacier article describe the relationship between rocks and glaciers? Lordgilman (talk) 14:14, 8 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The current text is "A glacier is a persistent body of dense ice, a form of rock, that is constantly moving downhill under its own weight." I don't think this is a particularly clear way to phrase it and I wasn't sure it was entirely grammatical at first. I don't have any opinion on "comprised of" other than there's probably a way to avoid it but my prose skills aren't as imaginative.

But I want to call out Giraffedata's edit comment: "correct to conform to source: glacier ice (a substance) is rock (a substance), which is different from a glacier (an object) being a rock (an object). The source never mentions a rock." I think this is a distinction without a difference and is responsible for the confusing phrasing. The rest of the article refers to glaciers and glacier ice interchangeably. I think without a question the article is poorer and more confusing with Giraffedata's edit so I'd like to see it reverted. However, I admit that I'm not the greatest writer so maybe there is a better way to phrase the whole thing and incorporate "glaciers are rocks" into the article. Lordgilman (talk) 14:23, 8 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

p.s. the USGS source also mentions the metamorphic processes that create glaciers explicitly. I didn't put "metamorphic rock" in my original edit but I probably should have done so and the agreed-upon phrasing should also call them metamorphic rocks and probably link to metamorphic rock. Lordgilman (talk) 14:30, 8 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Lordgilman -- I have a few academic sources on glaciology that I can look at to see how this sort of statement is phrased; I may have time this morning to go through them but if not it'll be some time next week. If I understand Giraffedata's edit correctly, he was mainly concerned about the usage of "comprised of" so he may not get involved in this RfC. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:00, 8 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Do you perceive a difference between "rock" and "a rock" in general? If I said "the sidewalk is rock" or "the sidewalk is made of rock", would you think that's the same as "the sidewalk is a rock?" I haven't read the whole article, but I really doubt it uses "a glacier" to refer to glacial ice, since they're quite different things. Many sentences would work referring to either a glacier or glacial ice, but many would not.

I actually think mentioning rock at all in the lead sentence is going to be confusing for most readers, since they don't use the word "rock" that way in their everyday lives. I think it's more of an interesting trivia point to put deep inside the article. But I'm not a geologist; I'm just a copy editor concerned about things like the proper use of indefinite articles. Bryan Henderson (giraffedata) (talk) 18:23, 8 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

To the average person, rock is a large solid stony mass, but a glacier is a mass of ice; and ice is frozen water, not stone. A geologist will tell you that a heavy mass of ice on an inclined surface will scrape the ground as it moves, wearing it down, breaking bits off, picking up pieces of whatever it passes over. Seen from below, a glacier may well be stony or even rocky: but it is still predominantly ice. In short: glaciers contain rocks, but are not themselves rocks. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:44, 8 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That's kind of beside the point, though, because on Wikipedia we go by reliable sources even if we don't believe them, and what we have here is a reliable source saying that glacial ice -- the H2O itself -- is rock. If there are other reliable sources indicating glacial ice isn't rock, we could have that conversation. Otherwise, we're either talking about 1) whether the source says a glacier is a rock; and 2) whether the idea that a glacier is made of rock belongs in the lead sentence.

By the way, it occurs to me that maybe not everyone here agrees that a glacier is not one chunk of ice, but lots of them. If the entire glacier were one chunk of ice, "a glacier is a rock" would be entirely correct, following the cited source. Bryan Henderson (giraffedata) (talk) 02:27, 9 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I agree Bryan Henderson (giraffedata) that most readers would find it surprising to have glacier ice referred to as rock. That information could be moved further down in the article, or maybe reworded as something like "Geologists consider glacier ice to be a form of rock." Also, because it's surprising to the general reader, I'd like to see a second source added, maybe one that's attributed to a specific geologist, or a widely used textbook, for example. —Anne Delong (talk) 23:50, 8 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

WP:ASTONISH applies here: When the principle of least astonishment is successfully employed, information is understood by the reader without struggle. The average reader should not be shocked, surprised, or confused by what they read Kowal2701 (talk) 00:35, 9 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Rock (geology) claims that a rock has nothing to do with ice or glaciers (except that glaciers can move rocks). Johnuniq (talk) 03:54, 9 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A Wikipedia article isn't a source, of course, but if what that article says is backed by reliable sources, those same sources could be used to put the same information in this article. However, I looked and don't see a claim in the rock article that a rock has nothing to do with ice or glaciers. In fact, just looking at the lead, it seems to agree with the USGS source that says glacial ice is rock. Wikipedia says rock is a mass of minerals. The Wikipedia mineral article in turn agrees with the USGS source that ice is a mineral.Bryan Henderson (giraffedata) (talk) 02:37, 10 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Surprising facts sometimes need to be acknowledged as surprising. Perhaps something like "Although made of water, it is technically considered a form of rock in the geological sense^[1]"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:47, 19 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

WhatamIdoing's above comment is in the right. There isn't actually any "debate" here in the sense of a disagreement about facts of external objective reality: "the Sun is a star primarily composed of hydrogen" vs "the Sun is a big ball of cheese". It's just a language dust-up over the polysemy of the English word "rock" and its different use in different contexts. The COMMONTERM of "rock", what immediately comes to mind for the average person when they hear the word employed, is "hard brittle mineral stuff that's solid at room temperature". Yet, people readily recognize that the word has different meanings contextually: No one serious believes that "Woah those are some rock-hard muscles" means literally, that the subject of discussion is a golem with muscles made of hard brittle mineral material, solid at room temperature, and goes to pick up a hammer and chisel to chip off a sample of them for further study.

In geology, "rock" and "not-rock" have more specialized meanings, as is common in just about any field of specialization; what geologists care about is a substance's behavior and the processes it participates in. For a geologist a glacier is a rock: it's brittle, undergoes elastic deformation, does general "rock stuff". WP's target audience is the general public, which is going in with the common understanding of "rock". The job of a WP article is to explain to those readers, that geologists use "rock" in a specialized meaning used in the field of geology, and under that field-specific meaning a glacier is a rock, and to explain for them why that is the case.

WP articles are there to inform and educate readers, not, to try to "gotcha" readers with something they obviously would know if they weren't so stupid and ignorant, don't you feel dumb for not knowing that, reader? Likewise: in digital circuits a latch is a type of basic electronic circuit, built from individual logic gates. But we don't go around in electronics articles just "springing" that on the reader when it's not already clear from context. Shift register doesn't begin, "a register is what you make by connecting multiple NOR or NAND latches together with an inverter". (I mean you obviously know that you make a basic register circuit by connecting flip-flops and latches right? How could you be such a simpleton as to not?) --Slowking Man (talk) 19:46, 23 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

For a geologist a glacier is a rock. We have no source that says that. We do have a source that says, according to geologists, glacial ice is rock. A rock is a chunk of rock. To get from "glacial is is rock" to "a glacier is a rock", you have to believe a glacier is a single chunk of glacial ice. We have no source that says that. Bryan Henderson (giraffedata) (talk) 20:30, 23 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah that's fine, say whatever the preponderance of reliable sources say. (It's an informal online message; I freely confess I didn't first do an exhaustive literature search before composing it.) If sources consistently say "glacial ice is rock", then say that and cite the sources. Important to avoid unproper SYNTHESIS. --Slowking Man (talk) 22:04, 23 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Glacier ice is, in fact, classified as a mono-mineralic rock, similar to limestone that is made up of calcite. Mineral ice is the crystal structure of water (H 2O).^[1]

Yes, that's the source that the article currently uses. The fact that glacial ice is rock, surprising as it is, isn't really in dispute. The question was whether, based on that, we can say glaciers are rocks (heading of this section) or in the singular, a glacier is a rock (one of the proposed wordings for the article); there's also a secondary question as to whether the fact that glacial ice is rock is appropriate for the lead sentence given that that is not how most readers think of rock. Bryan Henderson (giraffedata) (talk) 04:47, 26 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]