névés

Noun

névé (plural névés)

1. The firn or snowfield at the head of a glacier.
   • Then we started up a rise, and to our annoyance found ourselves amongst crevasses once more—very hard, smooth névé between high ridges at the edge of crevasses, and therefore very difficult to get foothold to pull the sledges.1913, R. F. Scott, chapter XVIII, in Leonard Huxley, editor, Scott's Last Expedition, volume I, Monday, December 25
2. Young, granular snow on a glacier, which has been partially melted and refrozen since deposition, but has not yet turned into firn by surviving a full season of ablation.
   • Haast's 1864 paper does not explain exactly why the glaciers should have come and gone as they did, but it appears that he believed that the onset of glaciation was due to the formation of his "high, plateau-like" range of mountains, acting as a moisture trap, with consequent névé accumulation on a...1972 April 27, D. R. Oldroyd, “Haast's glacial theories and the opinions of his European contemporaries”, in Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, volume 3, number 1, Taylor & Francis, →DOI...