But four years ago a small Antarctic ice shelf suddenly disintegrated, leading many people to think again.
The journey from a wintry Thames to the ice shelf of Antarctica will take just over a month.
Some points of interest will include McMurdo Sound, the Ross Ice Shelf, the Mertz and Ninnis Glaciers and Mount Erebus.
The melting of an ice shelf, which is merely a floating projection into the sea, would not affect sea levels.
The waning is happening on the Larsen B ice shelf, one of three shelves that make up the Larsen Ice Shelf.
Larsen B, a 1, 254-square-mile ice shelf, comparable in size to the U.S. state of Rhode Island, collapsed in 2002, the group said.
The ice shelf is hanging by a thread -- we'll know in the next few days or weeks what its fate will be.
Satellite images have revealed that three massive icebergs have been calved from the Ronne Ice Shelf in the Weddell Sea on the Antarctic coast.
Scambos said the ice shelf is not currently on the path of the increasingly popular tourist ships that travel from South America to Antarctica.
Temperatures in the Arctic are now even higher than they were then, and a period of renewed ice shelf break-up has ensued since 2002.
For climatologists who are trying to study how Antarctica's ice sheets might respond to a warming world, the ice shelf here is a perfect place.
With the loss of these three icebergs, the front of the Ronne Ice Shelf returns to about the same position it occupied in the 1950s.
"Reduced sea-ice conditions and unusually high air temperatures have facilitated the ice shelf losses this summer, " said Dr Luke Copland from the University of Ottawa.
"Wilkins is the largest ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula yet to be threatened, " David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey said, according to the Web site.
News of the Wilkins ice shelf's impending break-up came less than two weeks after the United Nation's Environment Program reported that the world's glaciers are melting away and that they show "record" losses.
It is known to have calved from the Ronne Ice Shelf sometime during the afternoon or evening of 4 May as satellite imagery indicates that the ice shelf was still intact on that morning.
The Ice Dragon, a modified Seaglider operated by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, has explored under the Antarctic ice shelf, and another modified Seaglider, the Deepglider, can plumb the depths down to 6km (20, 000 feet).
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The agency's Envisat satellite shows part of the Larsen Ice Shelf, which lies on a peninsula south of Chile, has decreased from 3, 463 square kilometers (1, 337 square miles) in March 2002 to 1, 670 square kilometers (645 square miles) today, a change the European Space Agency blames on warmer temperatures.
The station is equipped with landing strips built on sea ice and shelf ice, as well as a helicopter pad.
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"The collapse of Antarctic ice shelves is largely thought to be caused by warming of the atmosphere, but it appears that changes in sea temperature and ice-shelf structure are also important, " said Prof Glasser.
That breathing space would be useful if something really bad, such as the collapse into the sea of part of the Greenland ice-shelf, was in imminent danger of happening, and the realisation of the danger led to a political agreement that climate change had to be stopped rapidly.
"As of mid-March, only a narrow strip of shelf ice was protecting several thousand kilometers of potential further break-up, " the group said.
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