Polar ice cap

Seasonal variations of the ice caps takes place due to varied solar energy absorption as the planet or moon revolves around the Sun.

Additionally, in geologic time scales, the ice caps may grow or shrink due to climate change.

Earth's south polar land mass, Antarctica, is covered by the Antarctic ice sheet.

The current rate of decline of the ice caps has caused many investigations and discoveries on glacier dynamics and their influence on the world's climate.

In the early 1950s, scientists and engineers from the US Army began drilling into polar ice caps for geological insight.

These studies resulted in "nearly forty years of research experience and achievements in deep polar ice core drillings... and established the fundamental drilling technology for retrieving deep ice cores for climatologic archives.

In the past decade, polar ice caps have shown their most rapid decline in size with no true sign of recovery.

[11] Frozen carbon dioxide makes up a small permanent portion of the Planum Australe or the South Polar Layered Deposits.

[citation needed] Data collected in 2001 from NASA missions to Mars show that the southern residual ice cap undergoes sublimation inter-annually.

[12] On 29 April 2015, NASA stated that its New Horizons missions had discovered a feature thought to be a polar ice cap on the dwarf planet Pluto.