The cryosphere is all water ice on Earth’s surface, including ice caps, glaciers, sea ice, land ice, frozen lakes, snow, and permafrost. It reflects sunlight back into space, providing a cooling effect, and contains 77% of the world’s freshwater. Climate change is causing it to slowly decrease, which will add to sea level rise. Antarctica has the largest volume of ice, while snow-covered ground is the second largest component.
The cryosphere is the scientific name for all water ice on the earth’s surface: ice caps, glaciers, sea ice, land ice, frozen lakes, snow, permafrost, etc. The cryosphere makes up a major part of the planet as a whole, providing a cooling effect by reflecting sunlight back into space and causing positive feedback cooling cycles. The cryosphere is much larger today than it was during most of the history of life, when forests stretched from pole to pole and glaciation was limited to mountains at extreme latitudes.
As you can imagine, the cryosphere is huge. Since Antarctica separated from the Australian continent 20 million years ago, a frigid circumpolar ocean current has cooled the continent and caused it to be covered in ice all year round. The largest volume of ice in the cryosphere is concentrated in the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, which can reach depths of about two miles. 90% of global ice sheet volume is found in Antarctica, with another 9.5% in Greenland and only 0.5% in other areas such as northern Canada, Russia, Scandinavia and Alaska. The residence time of a given ice particle in an ice sheet can be very long, from 100,000 to 1 million years. Collectively, the world’s ice sheets contain 77% of the global freshwater total.
In terms of surface area, snow-covered ground forms the second largest component of the cryosphere, after ice sheets. The extent of the snow-covered terrain is very seasonal: the summer snowpack is only about 10% of the winter snowpack. The vast majority of snow ground is in the Northern Hemisphere, as the Southern Hemisphere has no ground to cover. Both human tribes and a variety of animal species are able to colonize the snowy terrain, but usually not the ice caps, which lack soil for plant growth. A couple of exceptions are polar bears and penguins, which live near coasts and consume fish.
As climate change continues to increase average global temperature, the extent of the cryosphere is slowly decreasing. It is estimated that the melting of the cryosphere will add at least a couple of centimeters to world sea level by 2100.
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