Cryosat-2 will measure very precisely the rates of change of sea and land ice in the Arctic and the Antarctic.
The Arctic's vulnerability is exacerbated by increasing flows of freshwater from rivers and melting land ice, as freshwater is less effective at chemically neutralising the acidifying effects of CO2.
But officials said the flights also will serve as a partial replacement for one satellite: NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite, known as ICESat.
Icebergs originate from ice sheets, which form on land from millions of years of snowfall.
Note that the warming before 1940 is attributable to the global recovery of temperatures from the Little Ice Age, and even the land based records show no warming over the last 13 years.
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They are a hockey team in a land without snow or even ice.
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Cryosat's radar instrument will make detailed maps of the ice that covers both the sea and land at the poles.
Police said a Land Rover Freelander skidded on ice on the A6108 at Bellerby, North Yorkshire, and came off the road, hitting the 57-year-old man.
This phenomenon, called Arctic amplification, occurs as highly reflective Arctic ice and snow melt away, allowing dark land and exposed ocean to absorb more sunlight.
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Modernity, they proudly and not uncontroversially say, has arrived in this backward region in the form of an engineering miracle that has laid tracks on land gripped year-round by ice, a railway line at higher altitude than any other in the world.
For a number of reasons, computer models with added atmospheric carbon dioxide preferentially warm the mid-and high-latitude land areas of the northern hemisphere that are ice-free, which also enhances summer melting of the relatively shallow ice in the Arctic Ocean.
In 60 years the ice caps could melt and one fifth of the world's land will go under water.
We fly over and land on Helheim Glacier, a major outlet for the ice sheet which has sped up dramatically in the last decade.
Further loss of Arctic ice will see radiation absorbed by darker seawater and snow-free land, potentially warming the Earth's climate at an even faster rate than current observational data indicates.
In a project within the International Polar Year called Igliniit, Inuit hunters recorded their observations of wildlife, sea ice, weather or other environmental phenomena as they travelled across the land.
When snow or ice melt, they are replaced by darker melt-water pools, land or sea.
Sea levels were 150 feet lower then, because the cold had locked up so much moisture in northern ice-caps, so not only were most Indonesian islands linked by land, but the Persian Gulf was dry and, crucially, the southern end of the Red Sea was a narrow strait.
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The trips all start with a five-hour private flight from Cape Town to an ice runway perched atop a 50m-tall frozen waterfall located within the Dronning Maud Land region in eastern Antarctica.
The discovery conjures up a picture of wandering groups of hunters making their way across dry land where the North Sea is now, after the end of the Ice Age.
Johnson, the deputy director of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), said Monday that Hurricane Gustav was expected to be a catastrophic storm when it reached land late Monday morning, but there was enough food, water, ice and other supplies stockpiled for 1 million victims over the next three days.
That is exposing land that has not seen light of day since the so-called Little Ice Age, a widespread climatic cooling that ran roughly from AD 1550 to AD 1850.
The Rangers captain went on to block two more shots in a frantic sequence without a stick, swiped a puck away with his hand, and land a pair of body checks before he was able to get off the ice.
When the vast ice sheets and glaciers melt, they lose their reflective power, and instead, oceans and land absorb the heat, causing the Arctic waters and the atmosphere to warm faster.
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They hypothesized that shrunken arctic sea ice at the end of summer meant that they had to swim over increasing distances to get to land, and, in a storm, they died of exertion.
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