What Is Glaciology and Cryosphere Science? Research Areas, Funding, and Career Paths

Glaciology is the scientific study of glaciers and other forms of naturally occurring ice: how it forms, how it flows, how much of it there is, and how it changes. Cryosphere science is the broader umbrella. The U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) defines the cryosphere as “Earth’s ice in all its forms,” a term that comes from the Greek word for icy cold, krios. It spans snow on the ground, lake and river ice, frozen ground and permafrost, ice sheets, ice caps and glaciers, ice shelves and icebergs, and sea ice. Because those components store water, reflect sunlight and shape ocean circulation and sea level, the field sits at the center of climate research. This guide explains the scope of glaciology and polar science, its subfields and methods, how field logistics and permits work, who funds the research, where the data live, and how people train for it.

Glaciology vs. cryosphere science vs. polar science

The three terms overlap and are often used loosely, so it helps to separate them:

• Glaciology is the narrowest and oldest of the three. Strictly, it is the study of glaciers and ice sheets, but in practice the word is often stretched to cover snow, sea ice and ground ice as well.
• Cryosphere science treats all frozen components of the Earth system together and asks how they interact with the atmosphere, ocean and land. It is the term most common in climate and remote-sensing contexts.
• Polar science is defined by place rather than by subject. It covers research in the Arctic and Antarctic, including the ocean, atmosphere, ecosystems, geology and human communities there, as well as the ice. A polar biologist and a polar glaciologist share a logistics system but not a research question.

None of these boundaries is rigid. A single research group might measure Greenland ice flow one year and Alpine glacier mass balance the next, and the same scientist may be described as a glaciologist, a cryospheric scientist or a polar scientist depending on the audience.

What the cryosphere includes

NSIDC’s overview gives a sense of the scale involved. Ice sheets, glaciers, ice caps and icefields together hold more than 70 percent of the freshwater ice on Earth, most of it in the ice sheets. The Greenland Ice Sheet is over 3 kilometers thick at its maximum and the Antarctic Ice Sheet is nearly 4.9 kilometers thick at its thickest point. NSIDC states that if the entire Greenland Ice Sheet melted, sea level would rise about 7.4 meters, and if the entire Antarctic Ice Sheet melted, about 60 meters. Those are illustrative bounds, not forecasts; the research question is how fast and how much ice is actually lost under particular conditions.

• Glaciers and ice caps are bodies of ice that flow under their own weight. Mountain glaciers respond relatively quickly to climate and are important regional water sources.
• Ice sheets are the continental-scale ice masses of Greenland and Antarctica. They are the largest potential contributors to long-term sea-level rise, and their margins include floating ice shelves that buttress the ice behind them.
• Sea ice is frozen ocean water. Because it already floats, its melting does not change sea level appreciably, but it strongly affects how much sunlight the polar oceans reflect, ocean-atmosphere heat exchange, polar ecosystems and the communities and shipping that use the ice.
• Permafrost and seasonally frozen ground are soil and rock that stay frozen for part or all of the year. Thaw changes the stability of the land and can release stored carbon, which links the field to soil science and to ecology.
• Snow, lake ice and river ice govern seasonal water supply, flood risk and the energy balance of cold regions, and they connect the field to hydrology.

Major subfields

• Glacier dynamics and ice-sheet physics — how ice deforms and slides, how ice streams and outlet glaciers speed up, and how ice shelves, grounding lines and basal conditions control flow.
• Mass balance and glacier hydrology — the budget of snowfall, melt, runoff and calving, and how meltwater moves through and beneath ice.
• Sea-ice science — thickness, extent, drift and the ocean-ice-atmosphere interactions that set them, closely allied with oceanography.
• Permafrost and periglacial science — ground temperature, active-layer depth, thaw processes and their consequences for infrastructure and carbon.
• Snow science — accumulation, snowpack properties, avalanches and seasonal snow cover.
• Paleoglaciology and ice-core science — reconstructing past climate and ice extent, described below.
• Ice-ocean and ice-atmosphere interaction — the coupling that links ice loss to circulation and to atmospheric processes.
• Glacial geology and geomorphology — the landforms and sediments that ice leaves behind, which is where the field meets geology.

Ice cores and what they record

Where snow accumulates year after year without melting, it compacts into ice and traps small samples of the atmosphere as bubbles, along with dust, sea salt, volcanic ash and other particles. Researchers drill cylinders of ice, called ice cores, and analyze them layer by layer. Chemical signatures in the ice, trapped gas composition and physical layering provide a record of past temperature, greenhouse-gas concentrations and atmospheric circulation extending back through the glacial cycles. The deeper the core, the older and more compressed the record. Drilling, storing and shipping cores is itself a specialist undertaking: cores must be kept cold, cut and sampled under clean conditions, and often shared among several laboratories, which makes sample-sharing agreements and curation an administrative topic as much as a scientific one.

Methods and tools

• Field measurement. Stakes and snow pits measure accumulation and melt at the surface; boreholes carry temperature and pressure sensors; GNSS receivers track ice motion; automatic weather stations record local conditions. Ground-penetrating radar and seismic surveys image ice thickness, internal layers and the bed beneath.
• Airborne survey. Aircraft carrying radar, laser altimeters and gravity instruments cover regions too large or remote for ground teams and map the bed topography under the ice.
• Satellite remote sensing. Orbiting instruments are the only practical way to monitor the whole cryosphere repeatedly. Radar and optical imagery map ice extent, surface velocity and snow cover. Laser altimetry measures elevation change: NASA’s ICESat-2, launched on September 15, 2018, carries a photon-counting laser altimeter and is used to measure the elevation of ice sheets, glaciers and sea ice. Gravimetry measures mass change directly: the GRACE-FO mission, launched on May 22, 2018 and following the original GRACE mission that began orbiting in March 2002, estimates Earth’s gravity field from the distance between two satellites and so tracks changes in ice sheets and glaciers along with water storage and sea level. For the underlying techniques, see CASRAI’s guide to remote sensing and, for the geophysical survey side, geophysics.
• Numerical modeling. Ice-sheet and glacier models solve for ice flow, thermodynamics and surface mass balance, and are increasingly coupled to ocean and atmosphere models to project future change. Their results depend heavily on observational constraints such as ice thickness and bed shape.
• Laboratory analysis. Ice-core chemistry, isotope and gas measurements, and microstructure studies are done in cold rooms and clean laboratories.

Polar field logistics and permits

Much of cryosphere science takes place in places where simply reaching the study site is the largest cost. Research in Antarctica, Greenland and the high Arctic depends on aircraft, ships, field camps and stations, and proposals are judged partly on whether the logistics are realistic. For U.S.-funded work in Antarctica, the National Science Foundation (NSF) manages the U.S. Antarctic Program, which it has run since the 1970s and which operates three year-round research stations and research vessels. NSF’s Office of Polar Programs (OPP) includes an Antarctic Infrastructure and Logistics section that provides the operational platform for U.S. science there, and an Environmental Team that manages environmental impact assessments and administers permitting for U.S. government Antarctic activities under the protocols of the Antarctic Treaty. NSF also coordinates all U.S. science in Antarctica under that treaty.

In practical terms, an Antarctic project should expect to plan well ahead for several things: a logistics request that fits within what the program can support in a given season, an environmental review of the planned activities, any permits that apply to what is being done, and safety and medical qualification for field personnel. The exact permit categories, forms and deadlines belong to the responsible agency and change over time, so confirm them with NSF OPP rather than relying on a general guide. Arctic work follows different rules: it takes place on or near the territory of Arctic states and Indigenous communities, so research licensing, local consultation and community engagement are set by the relevant national, regional and local authorities. CASRAI’s dictionary entry on traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) is a useful starting point for the principles of working with Arctic communities.

Data: NSIDC and polar repositories

NSIDC has advanced knowledge of Earth’s frozen regions since 1976. It is part of CIRES at the University of Colorado Boulder and operates the NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC). Its holdings are organized around sea ice, glaciers, ice sheets, frozen ground and permafrost, and snow, and it describes its mission as providing open-access data to researchers, policymakers and others. It also publishes near-real-time analysis products such as Sea Ice Today, Ice Sheets Today and Snow Today, and the widely used Sea Ice Index. Check NSIDC directly for the access and login requirements of any specific dataset.

NSIDC is not the only place polar data are deposited. For a side-by-side look at how it differs from a general-purpose Arctic repository, see CASRAI’s comparison of the Arctic Data Center and the NSIDC DAAC. Model output and reanalysis products relevant to ice-climate work are distributed through the infrastructure described in the Earth System Grid Federation guide and the Copernicus Climate Data Store guide.

Who funds cryosphere and polar research

• National Science Foundation. NSF OPP supports research on the polar regions through its Arctic Sciences and Antarctic Sciences sections, which fund research across scientific fields in the Arctic and in Antarctica, and provides the Antarctic logistics described above. NSF also chairs the Interagency Arctic Research Policy Committee. Cryosphere research that is not tied to the poles, such as mountain glaciers, can also be supported by NSF’s geoscience programs; see the NSF dictionary entry for the agency’s structure.
• NASA. NASA funds the satellites, airborne campaigns and data archives that make large-scale ice monitoring possible, including the missions named above and the NSIDC DAAC, as part of its Earth science work. Program names and solicitations change frequently; consult NASA’s current research opportunities pages.
• Other national and international funders. Other U.S. agencies, national research councils elsewhere (see the NERC funding guide for the UK example) and international programs such as those in the Belmont Forum guide also support polar and cryosphere work. NSIDC also notes an affiliation with NOAA through its NOAA at NSIDC program.

Funding priorities, budgets and program structures shift from year to year, so check the agency’s current solicitations before drafting a proposal, and expect polar proposals to need a logistics section that is reviewed alongside the science.

Societies, journals and assessments

Cryosphere research is published in dedicated journals, including the Journal of Glaciology, published for the International Glaciological Society, and The Cryosphere, an open-access journal of the European Geosciences Union, as well as in the broader Earth-science literature of the American Geophysical Union and others. Coordination across nations takes place through bodies such as the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) and the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has devoted a special report to the ocean and cryosphere; for how authorship and credit work in assessment efforts of that kind, see CASRAI’s explanation of IPCC author roles versus journal authorship.

Training and career paths

Glaciologists typically come from physics, geology, geography, mathematics, engineering or environmental-science backgrounds. Undergraduate preparation emphasizes calculus, physics, fluid mechanics and programming, plus courses in geology, geography or atmospheric and ocean science. Research careers usually require a PhD, often built around a field season, an ice-core or remote-sensing dataset, or modeling. Early-career researchers should expect field training in cold-weather safety, and polar fieldwork usually comes with medical and logistics screening. Employers include universities, government laboratories and agencies, polar-logistics organizations, engineering and consulting firms working on cold-region infrastructure, and water-resource and hazard-management bodies. Skills in handling large gridded datasets and in scientific programming are now routinely expected.

Glaciology and research administration

Cryosphere projects raise administrative questions that ordinary lab grants do not. Field seasons are tied to short polar weather windows, so budgets and award timelines must allow for logistics lead times and for the possibility that a season is cancelled or shortened. Environmental review and permitting are conditions of access rather than afterthoughts. Fieldwork involves safety obligations for personnel in remote and hazardous conditions, and Arctic projects add obligations to the communities on whose land the work takes place. Ice cores and other physical samples need curation and sharing agreements, and satellite-derived and field datasets are expected to be deposited in a suitable repository, so a data management plan matters from the outset. Because the work is international and multi-institution, grant offices routinely handle subawards, foreign collaborators and shared facilities. For the wider landscape of Earth-system fields, see ecology and the other disciplines linked above.

Frequently asked questions

What is glaciology in simple terms?

Glaciology is the study of glaciers and other natural ice: how ice forms and flows, how much there is, and how it responds to climate.

What is the difference between glaciology and cryosphere science?

Glaciology focuses on glaciers and ice sheets. Cryosphere science covers all of Earth’s frozen components, including sea ice, snow, lake and river ice, and permafrost, and studies how they interact with the rest of the climate system.

What is the cryosphere?

NSIDC defines it as Earth’s ice in all its forms, from snow on the ground to ice sheets, sea ice and frozen ground.

What are ice cores used for?

Ice cores preserve layers of snow with trapped air and particles. Analyzing them gives a record of past temperature, atmospheric composition and circulation.

How do scientists measure ice sheets from space?

Mainly with laser and radar altimeters, which measure surface elevation change, and with gravity missions, which measure mass change. ICESat-2 and GRACE-FO are examples.

Who funds polar research in the United States?

NSF’s Office of Polar Programs funds Arctic and Antarctic research and runs the U.S. Antarctic Program, and NASA funds satellite missions and data archives for monitoring ice.

Do I need a permit to do research in Antarctica?

U.S. government Antarctic activities are subject to environmental review and permitting administered through NSF under the Antarctic Treaty protocols. Which permits apply to a particular project depends on what you plan to do, so confirm with NSF OPP.

Where can I get snow and ice data?

NSIDC and its NASA DAAC are a primary source for sea ice, glacier, ice sheet, permafrost and snow data. See the Arctic Data Center vs. NSIDC DAAC comparison for alternatives.

What degree do I need to become a glaciologist?

A bachelor’s degree in a physical or Earth science is the usual start, and research careers generally require a PhD.