Glacier outburst floods or jökulhlaups, the Icelandic word for these floods, occur rapidly and can be surprisingly intense. The image shows the ice canyon that formed during the July 1998 outburst flood from Donjek Glacier in the Yukon. The physical processes associated with such floods are quite well understood and can be used to develop predictive hydraulic models of the flood hydrographs. Such floods are the largest in the geological record of the past 100,000 years.
Björnsson, H. 2002. Subglacial lakes and jökulhlaups in Iceland. Global and Planetary Change, 35, 255-271.
Clarke, G. K. C. 2003. Hydraulics of subglacial outburst floods: new insights from the Spring-Hutter formulation. Journal of Glaciology, 49(165), 299-313.
Flowers, G. E., H. Björnsson, F. Pálsson, and G. K. C. Clarke. 2004. A coupled sheet–conduit mechanism for jökulhlaup propagation. Geophysical Research Letters, 31, L05401, doi:10.1029/2003GL019088.