In January 2016, David Baker, an ecologist at The University of Hong Kong's Swire Institute of Marine Science received an unusual package: a frozen, lumpy mass of unknown fish seized at Hong Kong airport.
Antarctica is the largest frozen mass on the planet, accounting for about 90percentt of the earth's ice.
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin show how the rapidly shrinking glaciers are suddenly revealing artefacts that have until now been perfectly preserved in the stable, frozen mass for thousands of years.
But the crevasses also warm the ice as liquid water descends deep inside the frozen mass, with that process also potentially speeding its flow.
This is the frozen mass at the center of growing public concern, stoked by news coverage and social media outrage, over so-called pink slime, the low-cost blend of ammonia-treated bits of cow.
Also mentioned in the NASA release is the work of Kaitlin Keegan, a doctoral student at Dartmouth College whose focus is "firn," the newly deposited layers of snow cloaking the two-mile-thick ice sheet that will, over time, become the next dense layers in the great frozen mass.
The frozen mass was so white that the color burned her eyes, which have always been sensitive to light, but now the white has faded to a melted, bubbling puddle.
As the oceans have warmed, they've spurred more of the frozen mass to become water, researcher Fernando Paolo told VICE News.
Regardless, conditions will probably continue to shift as temperatures rise and the ice sheet sheds its frozen mass into the sea.
An "ice cap" is much smaller than an "ice sheet", a term that more properly describes the huge frozen masses covering Greenland and Antarctica.
