Earth is covered in nearly six million square miles (15 million square kilometers) of ice across its polar caps, glaciers, and ice sheets. NASA’s satellites and other scientific platforms provide scientists with data to make important cryospheric measurements such as how much polar ice is melting and raising sea levels, the degree that snow is being darkened by air pollution and reducing its ability to reflect sunlight, and the loses in permafrost that could lead to the release of carbon sequestered in the frozen ground into the atmosphere.

NASA’s cryosphere data span a wide variety of topics and include daily snowfall measurements, monthly frozen ground statistics, land ice heights, Greenland ice maps, Arctic sea ice altimetry, and even annual snowmelt duration date maps.