Due to their tremendous size (over fifty thousand square kilometres) and the need for a very cold climate these glacial features are only able to form in two areas of the world, those being Greenland and Antarctica.
The Antarctic Ice Sheet
Due to the continuing arrival of mass snow for the last 750,000 years, the Antarctic ice sheet is the largest single ice mass on earth, with a thickness of 4,200 metres in some areas. Covering almost fourteen million square kilometres it is inevitable that it swamps the majority of the Antarctic landscape with only the Transantarctic Mountains protruding through the sheet. The area itself is home to approximately thirty million cubed kilometres of ice, therefore storing an estimated ninety percent of the world’s fresh water, with the possibility of sea levels rising by seventy metres if the ice sheet should melt.
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