[Composite false color image of the Erebus Ice Tongue, a 7-mile-long, 33-foot-high sheet of ice projecting off the Erebus glacier in Antarctica, carved into unusual shapes by the summer waters of McMurdo Sound; via Wired Science: “During the summer, when the rest of the sea ice in McMurdo melts, the ice tongue floats on the water without thawing. As waves of sea water crash over the sides of the tongue, they carve elaborate shapes and sometimes create deep caves along the edges of the ice sheet. Occasionally, sections of the ice tongue calve off to form small icebergs.”]

As NASA’s “Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite” (or ICESat) is nearing the end of its life span, and the next ICESat is not scheduled to begin orbiting the earth until 2014, the Cryosphere Program (the arm of NASA concerned with the study of ice and things encased in ice) is, among other things, flying a “DC-8 plane equipped with lasers, ice-penetrating radar, and a gravity meter” across Antarctica for six weeks. A report on NPR last week noted that while these flights are primarily intended to monitor the polar ice itself — the subject of ICESat’s study — they are also providing a “major scientific bonus”: because the plane flies so low across the ice, its radar penetrates through the ice and is mapping, in real time and three dimensions, the buried and previously invisible terrain of the Anarctic continent. Glaciers, so massive and seemingly uniform from above, are peeled back — “like an onion” — to reveal an unstable topography of entombed but liquid lakes which “form… pop and deflate… flow[ing] downstream” beneath the bulk of glaciers, rivers flowing between those lakes, valleys carved and concealed by the glaciers resting in them, and deep fjords akin to the familiar fjords of Norway, regarding which NPR’s reporter asks the obvious question: “Will there be a day when people can walk through the fjords of Antarctica too?”