It has rained overnight and parts of the course are just a sheet of ice this morning.
Most of Greenland is covered by a sheet of ice that averages more than a mile thick.
Think of the independent contractor vs. employee line as a sheet of ice on a pristine winter lake.
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As a result, the sea is eating away the edge of the ice sheet at a faster rate.
The Elfstedentocht takes place anytime the weather is cold enough that the canals connecting 11 cities in the province form a thick and relatively unbroken sheet of ice.
Next week, if all goes according to plan, a small mountain of snow will be melted, repeatedly sterilised and then injected in a high-pressure stream of near-boiling water to clear a bore-hole through the two miles of the ice-sheet.
They all come from the Greenland ice sheet, a vast mass of frozen fresh water, hundreds of miles across and up to two miles thick.
Hansen suggested that a 10-year doubling time was plausible, pointing out that such a doubling time from a base of 1 mm per year ice sheet contribution to sea level in the decade 2005-2015 would lead to a cumulative 5-metre sea-level rise by 2095.
This makes Lake Vostok a place of great scientific interest, because the ice sheet above the lake provides the longest uninterrupted climate record known to exist.
Furthermore, the high-quality dating of the WAIS Divide core will make it easy to correlate with cores from Greenland's ice sheet, allowing for a tighter coupling of records from the Artic and the Antarctic.
This means that we can expect more than the one-meter sea level rise projected for 2100, a fact that the rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet, as well as strong indications that the western part of the Antarctic ice sheet is also melting, strongly support.
In their Nature paper, the authors comment that their "findings suggest that the Antarctic Ice Sheet may be a neglected but important component of the global methane budget".
Consequently, researchers don't yet know exactly how much of the ice-sheet melt is caused by a warming atmosphere and how much by a warming ocean.
Hansen thinks these sorts of changes would take several centuries, but he said we would have to deal with a "holy mess...as ice sheet disintegration unfolded out of our control".
About 14 million years ago, a period of climate change caused the formation of the Antarctic ice sheet, which averages one mile in thickness and gets up to three miles thick in some parts.
"We do see these big variations in the temperature in the mantle across parts of Antarctica that will have a big effect on the ice sheet, " Wiens said.
From a research station operated by the National Science Foundation called Summit Camp, a spot where the ice sheet is about 2 miles thick, GROVER will crawl at an average speed of 1.2 mph (2 kilometers per hour).
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The cause of this cold lurch was seemingly settled some time ago when Wallace Broecker, a Columbia University geochemist, suggested that a North American ice sheet collapsed, flooding the Atlantic with fresh water, which interrupted the normal circulation of the Gulf Stream.
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Several hours from the South Pole, in the barren expanses of western Antarctica, a small team of American researchers has just finished their second field-season with the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide Ice Core project.
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