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A polar ice cap or polar cap is a high-latitude region of a planet, dwarf planet, or natural satellite that is covered in ice. [ 1 ] There are no requirements with respect to size or composition for a body of ice to be termed a polar ice cap, nor any geological requirement for it to be over land, but only that it must be a body of solid phase ...
Currently, 28% of Arctic basin sea ice is multi-year ice, [2] thicker than seasonal ice: up to 3–4 m (9.8–13.1 ft) thick over large areas, with ridges up to 20 m (65.6 ft) thick. Besides the regular seasonal cycle there has been an underlying trend of declining sea ice in the Arctic in recent decades as well.
The south polar permanent cap is much smaller than the one in the north. It is 400 km in diameter, as compared to the 1100 km diameter of the northern cap. [22]: 154 Each southern winter, the ice cap covers the surface to a latitude of 50°. [39] Part of the ice cap consists of dry ice, solid carbon dioxide. Each winter the ice cap grows by ...
This compares to a volume of 2.85 million cubic kilometres for the Greenland ice sheet.) The southern polar cap has a diameter of 350 km and a maximum thickness of 3 km. [112] Both polar caps show spiral troughs, which were initially thought to form as a result of differential solar heating, coupled with the sublimation of ice and condensation ...
Antarctica is actually gaining ice mass thanks to snow and instead of driving sea level rise, it may actually be slowing it down.
It is believed that the loss of the ice sheet would take between 2,000 and 13,000 years, although several centuries of high emissions may shorten this to 500 years. 3.3 m (10 ft 10 in) of sea level rise would occur if the ice sheet collapses but leaves ice caps on the mountains behind, and 4.3 m (14 ft 1 in) if those melt as well.
The "polar vortex" that plunged Canada and the U.S. into historical cold last winter is said by researchers to have occurred because melting polar ice changes weather patterns, according to a ...
The polar ice caps are well-known telescopic features of Mars, first identified by Christiaan Huygens in 1672. [42] Since the 1960s, we have known that the seasonal caps (those seen in the telescope to grow and wane seasonally) are composed of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) ice that condenses out of the atmosphere as temperatures fall to 148 K, the ...