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Firn is partially-compacted névé
Neve

AMS-Neve is a manufacturer of music recording and broadcast consoles and hardware. It was originally founded as Neve Electronics in 1961 by Rupert Neve, the man credited with creating the modern mixing console....
, a type of snow
Snow

Snow is a type of precipitation in the form of crystalline water ice, consisting of a multitude of snowflakes that fall from clouds. The process of this precipitation is called snowfall....
 that has been left over from past seasons and has been recrystallized
Recrystallization

Recrystallization is a physical process that has meanings in chemistry, metallurgy and geology....
 into a substance denser than névé. It is ice
Ice

Ice is a solid phases of matter, usually crystalline solid, of a non-metallic substance that is liquid or gas at room temperature, such as ammonia ice or methane ice....
 that is at an intermediate stage between snow
Snow

Snow is a type of precipitation in the form of crystalline water ice, consisting of a multitude of snowflakes that fall from clouds. The process of this precipitation is called snowfall....
 and glacial ice.






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Firn From South Cascade Glacier
Firn is partially-compacted névé
Neve

AMS-Neve is a manufacturer of music recording and broadcast consoles and hardware. It was originally founded as Neve Electronics in 1961 by Rupert Neve, the man credited with creating the modern mixing console....
, a type of snow
Snow

Snow is a type of precipitation in the form of crystalline water ice, consisting of a multitude of snowflakes that fall from clouds. The process of this precipitation is called snowfall....
 that has been left over from past seasons and has been recrystallized
Recrystallization

Recrystallization is a physical process that has meanings in chemistry, metallurgy and geology....
 into a substance denser than névé. It is ice
Ice

Ice is a solid phases of matter, usually crystalline solid, of a non-metallic substance that is liquid or gas at room temperature, such as ammonia ice or methane ice....
 that is at an intermediate stage between snow
Snow

Snow is a type of precipitation in the form of crystalline water ice, consisting of a multitude of snowflakes that fall from clouds. The process of this precipitation is called snowfall....
 and glacial ice. Firn has the appearance of wet sugar, but has a hardness that makes it extremely resistant to shovelling. It generally has a density greater than 550 kg/m³ and is often found underneath the snow that accumulates at the head of a glacier
Glacier

A glacier is a large, slow-moving mass of ice, formed from compacted layers of snow, that slowly deforms and flows in response to gravity and high pressure....
.

Snowflakes are compressed under the weight of the overlying snowpack. Individual crystal
Crystal

A crystal or crystalline solid is a solid material whose constituent atoms, molecules, or ions are arranged in an orderly repeating pattern extending in all three spatial dimensions....
s near the melting point are semiliquid and slick, allowing them to glide along other crystal planes and to fill in the spaces between them, increasing the ice's density. Where the crystals touch they bond together, squeezing the air between them to the surface or into bubbles.

In the summer months, the crystal metamorphosis can occur more rapidly because of water percolation between the crystals. By summer's end the result is firn.

The minimum altitude that firn accumulates on a glacier is called the firn limit, firn line or snowline.