Abandoned glacier troughs -- High Arctic

Devon Island

North Greenland (Peary Land)

 

NE Greenland

These are very cold and dry regions, and although there are many ice caps and outlet glaciers there are also very expansive areas of ice-free land where permafrost features predominate. 

But massive abandoned glacier troughs are to be found in many areas, attesting to a past much more expansive glaciation by the Greenland ice sheet and from independent ice caps on the islands of the Canadian Arctic archipelago and in north Greenland.  I must investigate further.......

PS.  You can see a few other posts on glacial troughs if you put "glacier troughs" or "glacial troughs" into the search box.   Shortly before leaving Durham University in 1977 I started some research on "brutalised trough patterns"  -- but I never finished it.  One of my regrets......

Anyway, a classic area of brutalised troughs is to be found around Akureyri in northern Iceland, as featured on the front cover of our text book:

Such troughs are created (maybe over the course of many glaciations)  where there is a very heavy discharge of ice from one source area, with very few supplementary discharges coming in from the flanks -- leading to a "brutal" truncation of many of the interfluves and subsidiary valleys that might have existed at some earlier stage.