"What did you say?" said our young student of nature. "What started to ooze?"

"The ice. The ice started to ooze. You cannot stack ice on top of itself for ever," said our dear teacher.

Ice is not very strong stuff. When an ice cap gets very thick, the ice underneath, near the bottom, becomes weak and soft and it starts to flow. The only place for the moving ice to go is sideways. Near the middle if an ice cap the ice moves only a little and very slowly. Near the edges, where the ice meets the ocean, the ice squeezes out pretty fast. When the ice oozes out it gets strong and hard again. When the ice reaches the ocean, blocks of ice break away and make huge ice bergs. Some of the ice bergs from Antarctica are the size of New Jersey.

"When the ice started to ooze, the storms stopped getting bigger, didn't they?" asks the student.

"Yep! That's the end of it" says the storyteller. "The ice cap can't get any higher, the air can't get any colder, and the storms don't get any bigger. We have reached a stand off. The snow going into the ice cap is equal to the ice coming out. It stays that way forever, or at least until something really big happens."

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