Ice rafting is the transport of various material by ice

Ice

Ice is water frozen into the solid state. Usually ice is the phase known as ice Ih, which is the most abundant of the varying solid phases on the Earth's surface. It can appear transparent or opaque bluish-white color, depending on the presence of impurities or air inclusions...

. Various objects deposited on ice may eventually become embedded in the ice. When the ice melts after a certain amount of drifting, these objects are deposited onto the bottom of the water body, e.g., onto a river bed or an ocean floor. These deposits are called ice rafted debris (IRD) or ice rafted deposits. Ice rafting was a primary mechanism of sediment transport during glacial episodes of the Pleistocene

Pleistocene

The Pleistocene is the epoch from 2,588,000 to 11,700 years BP that spans the world's recent period of repeated glaciations. The name pleistocene is derived from the Greek and ....

 when sea levels were very low and much of the land was covered by large masses (sheets) of ice. The rafting of various size sediments into deeper ocean waters by icebergs became a rather important process. Ice rafting is still a process occurring today although its impact is significantly less and much harder to gauge.

The melting of large iceberg

Iceberg

An iceberg is a large piece of ice from freshwater that has broken off from a snow-formed glacier or ice shelf and is floating in open water. It may subsequently become frozen into pack ice...

s deposits sediment of various sizes, usually referred to as glacial marine sediment, onto the shelf and deeper marine areas.

Ice rafting may be used for analysis of ice drift

Ice drift

Ice drift is movement of ice. An important type of ice drift is drift of the sea ice, i.e., of the drift ice. Unless specified otherwise, this article discusses the drift of the sea ice. The direction of the ice drift is the vector sum of the oceanic and atmospheric circulations, i.e., upper ocean...

 pattern by matching the rafted sediment

Sediment

Sediment is naturally occurring material that is broken down by processes of weathering and erosion, and is subsequently transported by the action of fluids such as wind, water, or ice, and/or by the force of gravity acting on the particle itself....

 with its origin.

Ice rafting must also be taken into an account in archaeology

Archaeology

Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...

 and as a possible cause of displacement of archaeological artifacts.

See also

• Glacial debris
• Drift station
  Drift station
  A drift station is a term used to describe a temporary or semi-permanent facility built on an ice floe. During the Cold War the Soviet Union and the United States maintained a number of stations in the Arctic Ocean for research and espionage, the latter of which were often little more than quickly...
  
  , a facility built on an ice floe
• Dropstone
  Dropstone
  Dropstones are isolated fragments of rock found within finer-grained water-deposited sedimentary rocks. They range in size from small pebbles to boulders...
  
  
• Swallow float
• Glacial erratic
  Glacial erratic
  A glacial erratic is a piece of rock that differs from the size and type of rock native to the area in which it rests. "Erratics" take their name from the Latin word errare, and are carried by glacial ice, often over distances of hundreds of kilometres...