There are times when that lock becomes too tight and grating to bear, as when a blond figure, garbed in ice-blue, crawls through a room on all fours, while another woman shovels earth onto her, in a doomed but determined bid to bury her alive.
Obviously the Arctic Ocean was nearly or completely ice-free at the end of summer for centuries or even millennia, and still the polar bear survived and the Inuit culture radiated.