Jan 14, 2025 · ice sheet, any glacier that extends in continuous sheets, moving outward in all directions, whose area exceeds more than 50,000 square km (19,000 square miles). In general, such expanses of frozen water are called ice sheets if they are the size of Antarctica or Greenland and ice caps if they are smaller. During the 2020s ice sheets covered roughly 10 percent of Earth’s land area.

Nov 10, 2023 · An ice sheet is a mass of glacial ice more than 50,000 square kilometers (19,000 square miles). Ice sheets contain about 99% of the fresh water on Earth, and are sometimes called continental glaciers.As ice sheets extend to the coast and over the ocean, they become ice shelves. A mass of glacial ice covering less area than an ice sheet is called an ice cap.