moraine
noun·/məˈreɪn/
A ridge or mound of rock and earth carried and then left behind by a glacier, its debris made legible as landscape. A moraine is a record of motion, stone deposited by ice's slow insistence.
Beyond the meltwater lake, a moraine rose like a rough shoreline—the glacier’s handwriting after it had gone.
Etymology
From French moraine, a regional Alpine word for glacial debris. The term traveled with the science that learned to read valleys as histories of ice: heaps of stone reinterpreted as evidence, not accident.
Related Words
tillunsorted glacial sediment; often what moraines are made of
drumlinanother glacial landform, smoother and more streamlined
cirquea bowl-shaped hollow carved by glaciers
outwashsediment carried away by meltwater, beyond the ice