Ice sheets are continental-scale masses of ice that rest on land. The shape of an ice sheet is a dome that slopes downwards toward its edges, where the interior ice may be thousands of meters thick and the ice around the edges tens of meters thick. Ice sheets are dynamic, flowing from the interior toward the ice sheet's edge like honey poured onto a mound on a flat surface. The ice sheets serve as large reservoirs of frozen fresh water. This means that over time, when ice sheets gain mass, they contribute to a fall in global mean sea level, and when they lose mass, they contribute to a rise in global mean sea level. An ice sheet gains mass when snow falls on it, especially at high elevations within its interior. An ice sheet loses mass, however, due to various processes.
The Greenland Ice Sheet, the largest ice sheet of the Northern Hemisphere, holds enough water to raise global mean sea level by 7.4 meters, while the Antarctic Ice Sheet, the largest ice mass on Earth, sitting on the South Pole, has the potential to increase global mean sea level by 58 meters. Continue reading from NASA
Today, there are only two ice sheets in the world: the Antarctic ice sheet and the Greenland ice sheet. During the last glacial period, however, much of the Earth was covered by ice sheets....
The Antarctic ice sheet is the largest block of ice on Earth. It covers more than 14 million square kilometers (5.4 million square miles) and contains about 30 million cubic kilometers (7.2 million cubic miles) of water.
The Antarcfic ice sheet is about two kilometers (1.2 miles) thick. If it melted, sea level would rise about 60 meters (200 feet).
The Greenland ice sheet is much smaller than the Antarctic ice sheet, only about 1.7 million square kilometers (655,000 square miles). It is still the second largest body of ice on the planet. Continue reading from National Geographic
