The cryosphere is an all-encompassing term for the portions of Earth's surface where water is in solid form, including sea ice, lake ice, river ice, snow cover, glaciers, ice caps, ice sheets, and frozen ground. Thus, there is a wide overlap with the hydrosphere. The cryosphere is an integral part of the global climate system with important linkages and feedbacks generated through its influence on surface energy and moisture fluxes, clouds, precipitation, hydrology, atmospheric and oceanic circulation.
A sled, skid, sledge, or sleigh is a land vehicle that slides across a surface, usually of ice or snow. It is built with either a smooth underside or a separate body supported by two or more smooth, relatively narrow, longitudinal runners similar in principle to skis. This reduces the amount of friction, which helps to carry heavy loads.
An igloo, also known as a snow house or snow hut, is a type of shelter built of suitable snow.
The Ross Ice Shelf is the largest ice shelf of Antarctica. It is several hundred metres thick. The nearly vertical ice front to the open sea is more than 600 kilometres (370 mi) long, and between 15 and 50 metres high above the water surface. Ninety percent of the floating ice, however, is below the water surface.
Antony Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon was a British photographer and filmmaker. He is best known internationally for his portraits of world notables, many of them published in Vogue, Vanity Fair, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, and other major venues; more than 280 of his photographs are in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery.
Sea ice arises as seawater freezes. Because ice is less dense than water, it floats on the ocean's surface. Sea ice covers about 7% of the Earth's surface and about 12% of the world's oceans. Much of the world's sea ice is enclosed within the polar ice packs in the Earth's polar regions: the Arctic ice pack of the Arctic Ocean and the Antarctic ice pack of the Southern Ocean. Polar packs undergo a significant yearly cycling in surface extent, a natural process upon which depends the Arctic ecology, including the ocean's ecosystems. Due to the action of winds, currents and temperature fluctuations, sea ice is very dynamic, leading to a wide variety of ice types and features. Sea ice may be contrasted with icebergs, which are chunks of ice shelves or glaciers that calve into the ocean. Depending on location, sea ice expanses may also incorporate icebergs.
An ice shelf is a large floating platform of ice that forms where a glacier or ice sheet flows down to a coastline and onto the ocean surface. Ice shelves are found in Antarctica and the Arctic. The boundary between the floating ice shelf and the anchor ice that feeds it is the grounding line. The thickness of ice shelves can range from about 100 m (330 ft) to 1,000 m (3,300 ft). The world's largest ice shelves are the Ross Ice Shelf and the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in Antarctica. When a large piece of an ice shelf breaks off, this can lead to the formation of an iceberg. This process is also called ice calving.
A dirt cone is a type of depositional glacial feature. Dirt cones are not actually made entirely of dirt. They have a core of ice, snow, or firn that gets covered with material and insulated. The material, if it is thick enough, will protect the underlying core from ablation. The thickness of material needed to insulate the core is called the “critical thickness.” If the material is less thick than the critical thickness, it will actually speed up erosion of the core through ablation. This is called “indirect ablation.” The cone would then begin melting and shrinking away.
The Kills are an English-American rock duo formed by American singer Alison "VV" Mosshart and English guitarist Jamie "Hotel" Hince. They are signed to Domino Records. Their first four albums, Keep On Your Mean Side, No Wow, Midnight Boom, and Blood Pressures, all reached the UK Albums Chart. Their fifth studio album, Ash & Ice, was released in 2016 and reached the top 20 of the UK Albums Chart.
Blanket bog or blanket mire, also known as featherbed bog, is an area of peatland, forming where there is a climate of high rainfall and a low level of evapotranspiration, allowing peat to develop not only in wet hollows but over large expanses of undulating ground. The blanketing of the ground with a variable depth of peat gives the habitat type its name. Blanket bogs are found extensively throughout the northern hemisphere - well-studied examples are found in Ireland and Scotland, but vast areas of North American tundra also qualify as blanket bogs. In Europe, the southernmost edge of range of this habitat has been recently mapped in the Cantabrian Mountains, northern Spain, but the current distribution of blanket bogs globally remains unknown.
Alison Nicole Mosshart is an American singer, songwriter, artist, and the lead vocalist for the rock bands The Kills and The Dead Weather. She started her musical career in 1995 with the Florida punk rock band Discount which disbanded in 2000. She then co-founded the Kills with British guitarist Jamie Hince in 2000 in London.
James William Hince is an English guitarist, singer and songwriter, best known as the guitarist for the indie rock duo The Kills. He started his musical career in the bands Fiji, Scarfo, and Blyth Power. He co-founded The Kills with American singer Alison Mosshart in 2000. In The Kills, Hince is known as "Hotel".
Grease ice is a very thin, soupy layer of frazil crystals clumped together, which makes the ocean surface resemble an oil slick. Grease ice is the second stage in the formation of solid sea ice after ice floes and then frazil ice.
Classifications of snow describe and categorize the attributes of snow-generating weather events, including the individual crystals both in the air and on the ground, and the deposited snow pack as it changes over time. Snow can be classified by describing the weather event that is producing it, the shape of its ice crystals or flakes, how it collects on the ground, and thereafter how it changes form and composition. Depending on the status of the snow in the air or on the ground, a different classification applies.
In philosophy, a state of affairs, also known as a situation, is a way the actual world must be in order to make some given proposition about the actual world's truth; in other words, a state of affairs is a truth-maker, whereas a proposition is a truth-bearer. Whereas states of affairs either obtain or fail-to-obtain, propositions are either true or false. Some philosophers understand the term "states of affairs" in a more restricted sense as a synonym for "fact". In this sense, there are no states of affairs that do not obtain.
An Antarctic oasis is a large area naturally free of snow and ice in the otherwise ice-covered continent of Antarctica.
Suncups are bowl-shaped open depressions into a snow surface, normally wider than they are deep. They form closely packed, honeycomb, often hexagonal patterns with sharp narrow ridges separating smoothly concave hollows. For a given set of suncups, the hollows are normally all around the same size, meaning that the pattern is quasi-periodic on 20–80 cm scales. The depressions are typically 2–50 cm deep.
Charles Winthrop Molesworth Swithinbank, MBE was a British glaciologist and expert in the polar regions who has six places in the Antarctic named after him.
Terence Edward Armstrong was a British polar geographer, sea ice specialist, writer, and expert on the Russian Arctic.
Tianchi basins were meteorological measuring instruments used to gather and measure the amount of liquid precipitation over a period of time during the Song Dynasty. The instrument was devised by the Song Chinese mathematician and inventor Qin Jiushao in 1247.
