But ice has another meaning.

Ice mapping and monitoring for users who operate in the vicinity of the ice edge

They give birth inside the ice, and they feed on the Arctic cod that live under the ice.

You can imagine that the plants growing up like kelp through cracks in the ice, growing on the surface.

And it's always drifting. The pack ice is always drifting.

Now we have to get through the ice.

This is after an hour under the ice.

Sub surface water on Mars, frozen in the form of ice.

So there's a wall of ice a couple thousand feet deep going down to bedrock if the glacier's grounded on bedrock, and floating if it isn't.

So we know there's an ice shelf overhead.

This is about as good as maps get, and to reach it you've got to ski literally over the frozen crust, the floating skin of ice on the Artic Ocean.

I mean, it really was starting to break up.

But that's hard to do. Unfortunately, the ice is thick.

Ice overlying the lake is 3,750 to 4,350 metres thick.

The radar altimeter permits the measurement of wind speed, wave height, sea surface elevation, ice profile, land and ice topography, and sea ice boundaries.

High ice motion was correlated with the intensity of cyclonic activity, heat advection and the increase of snow accumulation on the ice sheet.

This past season, they manhandled them across the ice to waiting aircraft.

James Balog Time lapse proof of extreme ice loss

The scientists must insure that the ice is not contaminated.

Most importantly, these cylinders and this snow trap air.

The ice could be anywhere from three to 16 miles deep.

In this project, we're specifically interested, of course, in ice.

NASA described the ice conditions last year as the worst since records began.

that ice sheet became very dynamic and was very easily melted.

The thickness of the Arctic decreased more than 40 percent since 1960.

Brown Glacier, Heard Island, had retreated by 50 metres over three years, with the lower slopes of the glacier having lost as much as 11 metres in thickness, while Collins Glacier, King George Island, retreated by some 200 metres between 1987 and 2005.

The extra amount that disappeared last fall was equivalent to this much. It comes back in the winter, but not as permanent ice, as thin ice vulnerable. The amount remaining could be completely gone in summer in as little as five years.

Rob Dunbar Discovering ancient climates in oceans and ice

We drilled through a hundred meters of floating ice shelf then through 900 meters of water and then 1,300 meters into the sea floor.

The reason for that is that ice actually sucks moisture out of the atmosphere.

Ice mapping and monitoring have been performed regularly in high priority areas around Svalbard and along the ice edge.

I dropped down in this ice hole, just through that hole that you just saw, and I looked up under the underside of the ice, and I was dizzy I thought I had vertigo.

I guess the iconic figure of it is the melting of the ice in the Arctic Sea.

There are so many people who prefer to suffer in the ice they know instead of taking the risk of going through the ice to see what there is on the other side.

But they're forcing themselves to come up in these tiny little ice holes where they can breathe, catch a breath, because right under that ice are all the swarms of cod.

And we made the very first bore hole through the largest floating ice shelf on the planet.

All of that, strip it away. In the world of the arctic and alpine environments, where the ice is, it's real and it's present.

Most of Britain, all of Scandinavia, covered by ice several kilometers thick.

I literally couldn't keep up with the drift of the ice.

12. SAR permits the acquisition of all weather images of ocean , ice and land surfaces and it facilitates the monitoring of coastal zones, polar ice, sea state, geological features, vegetation, land surface processes and hydrology.

So what you're looking at is the surface of the moon Europa, which is a thick sheet of ice, probably a hundred kilometers thick.

But what happened is that the entire underside was full of these billions of amphipods and copepods moving around and feeding on the underside of the ice, giving birth and living out their entire life cycle.

And then, when we took additional pictures, we discovered that from these fractures are issuing jets of fine, icy particles extending hundreds of miles into space.

And when you have low productivity in this, in ice, the productivity in copepods go down.

So, this huge floating ice shelf the size of Alaska comes from West Antarctica.