A state park I recently visited triggered the idea for a theme about the geology related to glaciers.

esker – a long winding ridge of sediment (often resembles a railroad embankment) deposited by meltwater streams under a retreating glacier
[Irish eiscir. Here’s another picture.]

Sometime after noon the hunters climbed a long, narrow hill of sand, gravel and boulders, deposited long before by the leading edge of the glacier broaching farther south. When they reached the rounded ridge of the esker, they stopped for a rest, and looking back, Ayla saw the glacier unshrouded by mists … for the first time. She could not stop looking at it.
– Jean M. Auel, The Mammoth Hunters

cirque – a bowl-shaped hollow (like an amphitheater), at the upper end of a mountain valley, esp. one an the head of a glacier or stream.

The glaciers are getting closer every day, millions of tons of pale blue ice bulging down through their U-shaped cirques …
– Edward Abbey, Down the River

This word has some oddities. It’s pronounced ‘surk’. It’s from Latin for ‘circus’ (for the amphitheater-shape?) And its synonym is cwm, one of the few English words with none of the classic vowels.

[Edited to correct typo.]

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Do you mean Welsh cwm "valley"? This seems to be the source of English coomb, and it's cognate with hump .

I also think it should be cwm. And, in regard to the lack of vowels, we Welshmen get along famously without 'em, thanks very much!

in regard to the lack of vowels, we Welshmen get along famously without 'em, thanks very much!

Welsh, like most languages, has a number of vowels (link): their number vary depending on the dialect. Orthographic w is IPA /uː/. There's a difference between the number of vowels a language has, a measurable quantity, and how those vowels are represented or not (cf. Hebrew,which orthography does not traditionally mark vowels).

oops! typo. It should of course have been cwm, not cwn..

kame – a conical hill of water-rounded sand or small stones, deposited by glacial meltwater

Pronounced like came, the past tense of to come. Our quote is a continuation of yesterday’s quote.

We come to a dome-shaped pile of rocks about twenty feet high. This, we learn, is a kame, a deposit left here by the retreating glacier. Some of us climb it – overcoming a kame – and let it go at that.
– Edward Abbey, Down the River

drumlin – an elongated hill, often tear-shaped, formed by moving glacier ice – the blunt end faces into the glacier (contrast kame, formed by meltwater). Common in Ireland, southern Wisconsin, New England, and parts of upstate New York.

A famous drumlin is Breed’s Hill in Boston, site of a famous battle in the American Revolutionary War. (It is misnamed as the Battle of Bunker Hill, because American colonel Prescott had planned to set his defenses there, but later decided that Breed’s Hill would be more defensible. It was here, by the way, that he gave the command, "Do not fire until you see the whites of their eyes.")

Hill Cumorah [in upstate New York] is one of the holiest sites in all Mormondom, and great multitudes make a pilgrimage here. To a Utah Mormon, accustomed to the eleven-thousand-foot peaks thrusting heavenward, Cumorah’s puny dimensions must come as something of a disappointment. It humps up no more than a couple of hundred feet above the surrounding cornfields. All the same, this modest drumlin is the highest landform in the vicinity. Somewhere on Cumorah, 175 years ago, Joseph Smith dug up the golden plates that launched the Mormon faith.
– Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (ellipses omitted)

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Today’s picture will make clear why today’s word comes from French for ‘cottage cheese’! [Compare serum, which means ‘a watery fluid’ – like the whey of cottage cheese.]

sérac; serac – a pinnacle or sharp ridge of ice, among the crevasses of a glacier
(crevasse – a deep fissure or chasm)

Our quotes give a literal usage, plus a nice figurative one from Lawrence of Arabia.

The icefall was crisscrossed with crevasses and tottering seracs. From afar it brought to mind a bad train wreck, as if scores of ghostly white boxcars had derailed … and tumbled down the slope willy-nilly. … it is in the nature of seracs to move, the habit of seracs to topple.
– Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

About [the sand flat], in scattered confusion, sat small islands and pinnacles of red sandstone, grouped like seracs, wind-eroded at the bases till they looked very fit to fall and block the road; which wound in and out between them, through narrows seeming to give no passage, but always opening into another bay of blind alleys. Through this maze Auda led us unhesitatingly.
– T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph

I was pleased to see the additional picture referenced for esker was taken by Bill Shilts, a respected expert in glacial geology. It has been such fun to read and see photos of this week's words, in a field I concentrated in during my Masters studies in geology.

fjord – a long, narrow arm of the sea, running up between high banks or cliffs. Glacially eroded.
Fjords can be strikingly beautiful. Common in Norway. Alaskan fjords can exceed 100 miles long and 5 miles wide.

An orphaned mountain goat kid is tugging at the heartstrings of a boat crew. Only three weeks old, the pure white kid with black button eyes isn't yet weaned so it hadn't eaten since Friday, when its mother drowned in the sea. It is likely to die from dehydration. The goat can't escape its predicament because the terrain in the fjord is too steep, Weber said. "This little guy is either going to die in place there or it's going to get rescued."
– Juneau (Alaska) Explorer, June 2, 2008

Today’s paper reports that the kid made it and is recovering in the zoo, “bright, alert and responsive”.

Recall that a cirque is “a bowl-shaped hollow like an amphitheater, at the upper end of a mountain valley”.

tarn – a lake that develops in the basin of a cirque (more generally, a small mountain lake)

I prefer to quote modern usages, but this older one from Poe is too delicious to pass up.

I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling …
– Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher