It has rained overnight and parts of the course are just a sheet of ice this morning.
Most of Greenland is covered by a sheet of ice that averages more than a mile thick.
Think of the independent contractor vs. employee line as a sheet of ice on a pristine winter lake.
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The Elfstedentocht takes place anytime the weather is cold enough that the canals connecting 11 cities in the province form a thick and relatively unbroken sheet of ice.
Mechanisms on the verge of being instigated include loss of Arctic sea ice, shrinkage of the Greenland ice sheet, loss of Antarctic ice shelves, and shrinkage of the Antarctic ice sheets.
This means that we can expect more than the one-meter sea level rise projected for 2100, a fact that the rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet, as well as strong indications that the western part of the Antarctic ice sheet is also melting, strongly support.
Nottingham Police said Ranson Road in St Ann's was closed on Monday night because of sheet ice.
Scientists note that current climate-change models predict that some parts of the Antarctic ice sheet will grow while other parts will shrink, and that parts of the Greenland ice also will melt.
But the volume of the Martian north polar cap is less than half that of the Greenland ice cap, and about four percent of the Antarctic ice sheet.
The lake's location in the heart of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet makes it one of the most inhospitable environments on the planet.
The indirect effect is that it can "pre-condition" the ice shelves that float at the edges of the ice sheet.
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As a result, the sea is eating away the edge of the ice sheet at a faster rate.
Greenland's surface layer vaulted into the news in summer 2012 when higher than normal temperatures caused surface melting across about 97 percent of the ice sheet.
ENGADGET: NASA's GROVER eco-rover to examine Greenland's ice sheet (video)
These data will provide invaluable information about Antarctic atmospheric dynamics, of the origin of water vapour over the oceans and how it is ultimately deposited as snow on the surface of the ice sheet.
Consequently, researchers don't yet know exactly how much of the ice-sheet melt is caused by a warming atmosphere and how much by a warming ocean.
About 14 million years ago, a period of climate change caused the formation of the Antarctic ice sheet, which averages one mile in thickness and gets up to three miles thick in some parts.
Next week, if all goes according to plan, a small mountain of snow will be melted, repeatedly sterilised and then injected in a high-pressure stream of near-boiling water to clear a bore-hole through the two miles of the ice-sheet.
Scientists compare annual accumulation to the volume of ice lost to sea each year to calculate the ice sheet's overall mass balance and its contribution to sea level rise.
ENGADGET: NASA's GROVER eco-rover to examine Greenland's ice sheet (video)
Furthermore, the high-quality dating of the WAIS Divide core will make it easy to correlate with cores from Greenland's ice sheet, allowing for a tighter coupling of records from the Artic and the Antarctic.
Hansen thinks these sorts of changes would take several centuries, but he said we would have to deal with a "holy mess...as ice sheet disintegration unfolded out of our control".
The team also hopes to take samples of mud from the bottom of the lake, to better understand the geological history of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and Earth's past climate.
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They all come from the Greenland ice sheet, a vast mass of frozen fresh water, hundreds of miles across and up to two miles thick.
Hansen suggested that a 10-year doubling time was plausible, pointing out that such a doubling time from a base of 1 mm per year ice sheet contribution to sea level in the decade 2005-2015 would lead to a cumulative 5-metre sea-level rise by 2095.
Today, the ice sheet provides habitat for many species of seabirds, seals and penguins.
The radar sends radio wave pulses into the ice sheet, and the waves bounce off buried features, informing researchers about the characteristics of the snow and ice layers.
ENGADGET: NASA's GROVER eco-rover to examine Greenland's ice sheet (video)
This makes Lake Vostok a place of great scientific interest, because the ice sheet above the lake provides the longest uninterrupted climate record known to exist.
The plan to drill through the Antarctic ice-sheet to sample the hidden waters of Lake Ellsworth in December involves BAS and NOC and other bodies and is led by a professor from Bristol University.
They estimate that there could be hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon stored in methane reservoirs under the ice sheet.
In their Nature paper, the authors comment that their "findings suggest that the Antarctic Ice Sheet may be a neglected but important component of the global methane budget".
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