Episode Details

A glacier looks like the stillest thing on Earth, and yet it is quietly flowing, carving valleys and fjords, and preserving an extraordinarily detailed record of the planet's past climate in its layered ice. This episode follows the journey from falling snow to flowing glacial ice, explains how ice sculpts landscapes, what ice cores reveal about Earth's ancient atmosphere, and gives an honest account of what is and isn't yet certain about the future of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

You'll come away understanding how snow becomes firn and then glacial ice, why ice flows like a slow-moving plastic solid, how plucking and abrasion carve U-shaped valleys and fjords, what glacial mass balance means, how ice cores are read like a climate archive, and why scientists are confident ice sheets are losing mass but genuinely uncertain about exactly how fast future loss will unfold.

Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au

Further reading: NASA – Ice sheet and glacier science pages (Vital Signs, ICESat-2); British Antarctic Survey – research on West Antarctic ice sheet dynamics; NOAA – National Centers for Environmental Information ice core data resources; IPCC – Assessment Report chapters on ice sheets and sea level.