Beijing has long been anticipating the ice chunks and subtly adjusting the rudder around inflation without steering the economic ship too far off course.

FORBES: Chinese Dragon Still Snorting Loudly

But it had also dislodged vast chunks of ice from around the Pole and they had drifted south into our path.

BBC: The 'big melt' at the roof of the world

Best viewed from Zodiacs, passengers can watch as 10-storey high chunks of ice intermittently calve from the glacier facades and smash into the water below.

BBC: Life in the fragile, frozen Arctic

"Big hefty chunks of ice, the size of small houses, look as though they've been thrown around like rubble -- it's like an explosion, " he said.

CNN: Massive ice shelf on verge of breakup

Though the field sits in shallow water, this part of the Caspian freezes over in winter and fierce winds blow chunks of ice into the islands that the consortium has built to develop the field.

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On the Seward Highway just south of Anchorage, a motorist was critically injured Friday when chunks of thawing ice fell onto her pickup truck from cliffs above the two-lane thoroughfare.

WSJ: Winter Seems Eternal in Anchorage, Alaska

"We've seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted, " he said.

CNN: Lander grabs Mars water, will see if it's life-supporting

For now, her staff carefully clears ice from the holes with a gasoline-powered auger and then pulls out stray chunks with a ladle-like strainer at the beginning of each shift.

WSJ: Fishing Is Just Not the Same Without a Very Cold Brew

Her skates are chunks of steel as long as 13 feet (the crew changes skate length according to ice conditions), with an almost imperceptible curve along the bottom and a razor-sharp edge so that the skate bites hard into the ice.

FORBES: Shiver Me Timbers