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When water freezes, it becomes ice.
Ice is very hard and cold.
A glacier is a frozen river.
Ice sheet is a huge layer of ice on the land.
Icebergs are huge chunks of ice floating in the sea.
Ice is frozen water. In many places winter is very cold and ground water freezes. Ice many centrimetres thick forms over the top of water in streams, dams, ponds and even rivers. Water pipes are buried deep underground so that the water going to houses doesn't freeze in the pipes.
An ice sheet is the biggest form of ice that covers land. The fastest moving parts of an ice sheet are glaciers and ice streams. They drain ice away from the ice sheet into the ocean.
In some places, the ice never melts. In Antarctica, the whole continent is covered by two huge ice sheets.
A glacier is a river of frozen fresh water, made of layers of snow that turn to ice. Glaciers form in places where the snow does not melt. The weight of the ice combined with gravity, makes the glacier move very slowly downhill, often ending at the ocean or a lake.
At the edge of the sea, large chunks of the glacier break off, which is called calving, and float away as icebergs.
The Athabasca Glacier in Columbia
An ice shelf is a floating mass of ice in the ocean at the edge of the land. Sometimes an ice shelf is formed where moving ice from several places meets and joins up. The biggest ice shelf is Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf.
Ice shelf in Antarctica with mountains behind
Huge icebergs near Antarctica
When huge chunks of ice shelf break off and float away, they are called icebergs. Icebergs can be huge, but most of the iceberg is out of sight under the water. As an iceberg is moved by the ocean currents, it gradually breaks up into smaller icebergs.
Sea ice is frozen sea water.
The sea in the polar oceans gradually freezes over in winter and melts again in summer. In winter, the frozen sea ice around Antarctica actually doubles the size of the continent.
Sea ice in the Arctic Ocean starting to break up
Read more about Glaciers here
http://www.uvm.edu/whale/GlaciersWhatAre.html
http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngexplorer/0501/quickflicks/
http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/articles/2004/06/10/glacierlife.php
http://nsidc.org/glaciers/
If you use any part of this in your own work, acknowledge this source in your bibliography like this:
Sydenham, S. & Thomas, R. Ice [Online] www.kidcyber.com.au (2005)
Updated November 2008 ©kidcyber
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