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

He accidentally fell through the ice into the sea.

That's the Ross Sea Ice Shelf on the right there.

When that ice melts, sea level rises by six meters.

And I have also, every year, seen less and less sea ice.

So, there goes the ice caps, and there comes 240 feet of sea level rise.

These ringed seals also live out their entire life cycle associated and connected to sea ice.

If its ice sheet melted completely, sea levels would rise by seven meters meaning that we cannot afford to lose even a small fraction of the ice sheet. Meanwhile, satellite data show that Antarctica s ice sheet, which is ten times larger than Greenland s, is losing ice as well.

I spent time skiing across the sea ice for weeks at a time in the high Arctic.

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

And the rate at which the Arctic Sea ice is going away is a lot quicker than models.

The weight of the ice is such that the entire continent sags below sea level, beneath its weight.

We're seeing them in the Beaufort Sea, floating in the open ocean where the ice has melted out.

There isn't even a pole at the Pole. There's nothing there, purely because it's sea ice. It's drifting.

In the two years before my swim, 23 percent of the arctic sea ice cover just melted away.

We're inundated with news all the time that the sea ice is disappearing and it's at its lowest level.

In addition to the sea ice loss, satellite data show that Greenland s three kilometer thick continental ice sheet is also melting at a record rate. In July, 97 of the sheet s surface was affected.

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.

Several measurements are derived at a global scale from backscattered signals of downward emitted radar pulses, including the height of sea and ice surfaces, the height of sea waves and the wind speed at the sea surface.

We all got down onto the ice, and I then got into my swimming costume and I dived into the sea.

The vanishing Arctic sea ice also affects the atmosphere. Less ice reflects less sunlight, and more open ocean absorbs more heat, which is then released into the atmosphere, affecting wind and pressure patterns throughout the northern hemisphere.

That's the Russians planting a flag on the ocean bottom to stake a claim for minerals under the receding Arctic sea ice.

In these images we see ice from enormous glaciers, ice sheets that are hundreds of thousands of years old breaking up into chunks, and chunk by chunk by chunk, iceberg by iceberg, turning into global sea level rise.

Now, West Antarctica is the part of the continent where the ice is grounded on sea floor as much as 2,000 meters deep.

And in fact, scientists were originally saying sea ice is going to disappear in the next hundred years, then they said 50 years.

These curves for global temperature, atmospheric CO2 and sea level were derived from ocean cores and Antarctic ice cores, from ocean sediments and snowflakes that piled up year after year over 800,000 years forming a two mile thick ice sheet.

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.

Now they're saying the sea ice in the Arctic, the summertime extent is going to be gone in the next four to 10 years.

But as disturbing as that is, I think the bigger problem for harp seals is the loss of sea ice due to global warming.

Here's some data from actually just 10 days ago, which shows this year's minimum of the Arctic Sea ice, and it's the lowest by far.

The calving face is the wall where the visible ice breaks off, but in fact, it goes down below sea level another couple thousand feet.

So what that means is, what it tells us is that the Ross Sea region, this ice shelf, melted back and formed anew about 35 times.

Last month, an unprecedented new low was reached after decades of decline. Indeed, the ice cap s area has decreased by half since the 1980 s, when summer sea ice still extended over roughly seven million square kilometers, as opposed to less than four million today.

We know that the sea level rose by roughly 100 meters during the last 12,000 years. This rise was clearly connected with the melting of the continental ice sheets at the end of the last ice age that is, it had nothing to do with human activities.

But what makes the Ross Sea important is the vast sea of pack ice that in the spring and summer provides a wealth of phytoplankton and krill that supports what, till recently, has been a virtually intact near shore ecosystem.

Decorative Ice

At the end of the last Ice Age, for example, global temperature rose by about 5ºC over a period of 5,000 years. This was enough to transform the Earth s vegetation cover, melt two thirds of the continental ice masses, and raise sea levels by more than a hundred meters.

Because it's partly floating, you can imagine, is sea level rises a little bit, the ice lifts off the bed, and then it can break off and float north.

Ice in my ice chest melted within hours, and it was pretty miserable.

This is ice.

The data is fundamental to our understanding of contemporary processes of global relevance such as ozone depletion, atmospheric pollution, climate change, the melting of ice shelves and glaciers and sea level rise.

I make ice cream.

Or perhaps I can assemble one out of dot and dash ice cubes ice cube Morse code.

An Argentine ice breaker provided assistance to the ice bound vessel Magdalena Oldendorff in June July 2002.

If you include the coastal ice shelves, you can see that the Ross Ice Shelf it's the big one down here the Ross Ice Shelf is the size of France.