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In a previous lecture on the antarctic by biologist Peter Convey, we learned that a lot of the glaciers on the antarctic was more than a kilometre thick. Thus, during the permafrost lecture, fellow student Mattheo asked an interesting question. If you insulate the ground with a kilometre thick glacier, shouldn’t it warm up in the bottom enough to melt a lot of that ice and create huge ice caves? Hanne confirmed that yes, huge under-ice caverns are thought to exist under a lot of the antarctic glaciers and they should be huge indeed.

The thought of massive ice-caves containing lakes and rivers under enormous glaciers sounds immensly appealing to me. If any glaciologists or geologist blog-readers out there ever wanna drill down into one of those sometime in the future, please take me along as a field assistant or if you need a biologist. Meanwhile, I’ll settle for the ice cave on the Longyear glacier which, although not as impressive, is also very nice.