An ice shelf is a slab of ice, often hundreds of meters thick, that is attached to a coastline and extends over the adjacent ocean waters. Massive ice shelves hug the perimeter of Antarctica. One...

In 2012, The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funded the CHARIS project, or the Contribution to High Asia Runoff from Ice and Snow, at NSIDC and the University of Colorado Boulder. The project, which is coming to its end this September, has helped forecast the future availability of water resources in High Asia by assessing how glaciers and seasonal snow contribute to freshwater resources.

In recent years with sharp summer sea ice decline, the Arctic seems more sensitive to climate warming than elsewhere on Earth. But are other frozen features of Earth changing too? Notably, most of...

About 70 percent of the planet’s freshwater is locked up in ice sheets: massive ice bodies spanning more than 50,000 square kilometers (20,000 square miles). Our planet has two ice sheets, one...

A glacial lake is a body of water that originates from a glacier. It typically forms at the foot of a glacier, but may form on, in, or under it. As Earth’s climate warms, the world’s glaciers are...