hummock

hummock

1. a hillock; knoll

2. a ridge or mound of ice in an ice field

3. Chiefly southern US a wooded area lying above the level of an adjacent marsh

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

hummock

[′həm·ək]

(ecology)

A rounded or conical knoll frequently formed of earth and covered with vegetation.

(geology)

A rounded or conical knoll, mound, hillock, or other small elevation, generally of equal dimensions and not ridgelike. Also known as hammock.

(hydrology)

A mound, hillock, or pile of broken floating ice, either fresh or weathered, that has been forced upward by pressure, as in an ice field or ice floe.

McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Hummock

 

a pileup of fragments of ice floes on the ice cover of seas, rivers, and lakes. Hummocks are caused by the lateral pressure of ice fields on one another and on the shoreline and shoals, which results in fragmentation of the edges of the fields. Hummocks are most common in the East Siberian and Chukchi seas and in the open part of the Arctic Ocean, where their height sometimes exceeds 8–9 m (in coastal areas it may reach 15–20 m).

Among the forms of hummock development that are distinguished are ridges (in solid drifting ice), barriers (hummock ridges on the margin of the shore ice, occasionally resting on the bottom), standing floes (ropaks), and stamukhi (individual pile-ups on shoals). The degree of development of hummocks is measured on a five-point scale; 0 indicates a completely smooth ice sheet, and 5 means that the ice sheet is completely covered with hummocks.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.