the.com/icecap
the planet's white memory, archiving every breath of air it ever swallowed.
means A thick, enduring layer of ice that covers a region such as a polar zone or a mountaintop, persisting through the seasons.
from A transparent compound of "ice" and "cap." "Ice" descends from Old English īs, a word shared across the Germanic family (German Eis, Old Norse íss). "Cap" comes through Old English cæppe from Late Latin cappa, a hood or covering — the same root behind "cape" and "chapel." So an icecap is, quite literally, a cap of ice: a frozen hood pulled over the top of a mountain or a pole. The earth-science sense, naming the great frozen sheets at the poles, settled into place as geology and polar exploration matured in the 19th century.
- air archive
- Trapped bubbles store atmospheres hundreds of thousands of years old
- slow flow
- Ice creeps downhill like extremely patient stone
- sea threat
- Greenland's cap alone could raise oceans seven meters
- weighs land
- Its mass literally pushes continents downward into Earth
- hidden world
- Liquid lakes survive sealed beneath kilometers of ice
greenland ice sheet — covers 1.7 million km², losing 280 billion tons of ice per year as of 2019
antarctic ice sheet — largest ice mass on earth at 26.5 million km², contains 90% of world's ice
canadian arctic archipelago — 35 major ice caps covering northern canadian islands, losing ice fastest outside greenland