It's not static.

This is the foundation of the whole food chain in the Arctic, right here.

And we drilled in the Ross Sea.

They'll think about a big ass ship in the North Pole, breaking ice. Says you.

But it's the North Pole.

This was a bear I sat with for a while on the shores.

We scouted the ice moon. Found an entire subsurface ocean.

The weight of the ice is such that the entire continent sags below sea level, beneath its weight.

The one glacier up in Greenland that puts more ice into the global ocean than all the other glaciers in the northern hemisphere combined is the Ilulissat Glacier.

Unlike sea ice or pack ice, which form when the ocean freezes, glaciers are made of fresh water.

These ringed seals also live out their entire life cycle associated and connected to sea ice.

And this vent fluid is about 600 or 700 degrees F.

Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Second, remember that the Arctic is really a frozen ocean.

By 14,000 years ago, the Ice Age was winding down.

The continents move apart. They come back together.

Because it's partly floating, you can imagine, is sea level rises a little bit, the ice lifts off the bed, and then it can break off and float north.

Icebergs had been grounded on the beach.

There isn't even a pole at the Pole.

When the floating seabased ice cracked up, it no Ionger held back the ice on the land, and the Iandbased ice then started falling into the ocean.

This glacier has doubled its flow speed in the past 15 years.

I went to Hokkaido to see the floating ice.

One of the magical things about this journey, however, is that because I'm walking over the sea, over this floating, drifting, shifting crust of ice that's floating on top of the Arctic Ocean is it's an environment that's in a constant state of flux.

It is the force of gravity that pulls them towards the sea, where a glacier may calve off to become an iceberg or continue to spread up as an ice shelf or an ice tongue.

Ice and Glaciers

It makes it seem almost as if we're looking through the ice to the ocean beneath.

In these images we see ice from enormous glaciers, ice sheets that are hundreds of thousands of years old breaking up into chunks, and chunk by chunk by chunk, iceberg by iceberg, turning into global sea level rise.

A number of years ago, he tried to ski all the way to the North Pole.

We're seeing them in the Beaufort Sea, floating in the open ocean where the ice has melted out.

This, of course, is the Arctic Ocean, the floating ice cap.

I wonder if the sea level really will rise when the ice at the North Pole melts.

These curves for global temperature, atmospheric CO2 and sea level were derived from ocean cores and Antarctic ice cores, from ocean sediments and snowflakes that piled up year after year over 800,000 years forming a two mile thick ice sheet.

But imagine we're looking at an ice skating rink from above.

Does that mean no, you don't want ice, or no, you want ice?

Let's talk about the Arctic first.

You notice that each tray holds the exact same amount of water, but has a different number of ice cubes that it makes.

Not enough to stabilize the climate.

Let's take ice because ice is easier to move

This melting has a major impact on the ocean around an iceberg.

Decorative Ice

Ice

Snow and ice,

Ice 2.0.

And so, as the surrounding water gets warmer, it speeds up the melting of the ice.

It's flowing out to the Atlantic Ocean on the left.