Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun An Arctic mound or conical hill, consisting of an outer layer of soil covering a core of solid ice.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun geomorphology A conical mound with an ice core (that is, a mound of earth-covered ice), particularly if lasting more than a year; caused by permafrost uplift.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Inuit pingu, hill, mound.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Greenlandic or Inuktitut pingu ("small hill").

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Examples

Comments

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  • A rock peak covered by ice but remaining distinguishable; a dome-shaped mound consisting of a layer of soil over a core of ice; a circular depression, frequently water-filled, thought to be the remains of such a mound formed during former periglacial conditions.

    January 1, 2008

  • "Dirt" in Sassarese.

    March 18, 2011

  • Clean your penguins please! Really, Pro.

    March 19, 2011

  • "The only features of the bright white tundra were pingos--mounds of earth that have been pushed upward when underground water, trapped by permafrost, has frozen and expanded. They looked like giant congealed molehills that were perhaps the height of a person, perhaps many times that. ... I later found out that some of those pingos around Tuktoyaktuk were 150 feet high ... and nine hundred feet in diameter."

    --Polly Evans, Mad Dogs and an Englishwoman: Travels with Sled Dogs in Canada's Frozen North (NY: Bantam Dell, 2008), 199-200

    January 25, 2017

  • "What's left behind are new surfaces: kettle moraines, outwash plains, pingos, and scoured barren grounds."

    The Future of Ice by Gretel Ehrlich, p 33 of the Vintage paperback edition

    August 2, 2019