According to a survey, there are about 120 million penguins living on the Antarctic Continent. It’s hard to imagine that in such a world of snow and ice, there are so many lives indomitably passing on from generation to generation, despite only having no other resources aside from sea water and the huge ice sheets.

This modern ice sheet – or the continental glacier – is the most widely distributed of the glacier family. Two typical continental glaciers are the Antarctic Continental Glacier and the Greenland Continental Glacier. These two glaciers represent 97% of the world’s glaciers, and occupy almost the entirety of Antarctica and Greenland. Continental glaciers unfold like huge ice plates which are thick in the middle and thin on the edges. The thickness of the central part is about 3,000 metres. Wherever continental glaciers flow into the sea, a huge ice apron stretches out. When parts of the ice apron break off and float out in the water, they are called icebergs.

The Antarctic ice sheet has an area of about 13 million square kilometers. The Antarctic Continent, except for some high peaks, is covered by ice the thickness of which of reaches 4,276 metres in the eastern part of the continent. The thick ice layer conceals the true colours of the Antarctic Continent, but through geophysical measurements scientists have found that under the huge ice mass there are many small lakes containing living creatures. Greenland is the largest island in the world with an ice sheet of about 1.74 million square kilometers. About 83% of the island is covered by glaciers.

There are other types of glaciers, based on their shape and location topography, including the mountain or alpine glacier. Mountain glaciers are usually located in the upper elevations of mountains. Temperatures there are below zero all year with large amounts of snowfall. Mountain glaciers are also called alpine glaciers because they are formed in the regions above the snow line. Alpine glaciers have a bowl-shape depression for reserve ice called a firn field or a cirque. Alpine glaciers flow from the cirque down to the slope, becoming a long strip of flowing ice. Most of the world’s Alpine glaciers are located in the mountainous areas of the Asian-European continent. Alpine glaciers in China are mainly on the upper part of the Himalayas, including Mount Gandisi, Mount Tanggula, Kunlun Mountain, Tianshan Mountain and Mount Qilianshan, all of which are the natural “Solid Reservoir” of China. This area is the source of the Yangtze River, the Yellow River and other large rivers.