The Polar POD will never be far away, but never close to this great ice colossus either. Perhaps the crew will see, with a glance through binoculars, blue cliffs streaked with brown, dominating the sea behind a screen of fog. This gigantic piece of mille-feuilles sliced cleanly with a knife is a cross-section of the edges of the immense Antarctic ice cap, regularly revived by the loss of fragments that collapse into the sea.

The Antarctic ice cap has gigantic dimensions. Thirty million km² of water are retained here: 90% of all the land ice! In the East, the ice sheet reaches 4,800 m at its thickest point (69°54'S, 135°12'E) and its base sinks to 2,550 m below sea level in the most important basement depression, the Bentley Trough. On the other hand, at Argus Dome, the cap is only 1,000 m thick despite an altitude of 4,000 m, because there it completely covers a subglacial mountain: the Gamburtsev massif. This continental cap or islandsis, is unevenly distributed. The portion that covers East Antarctica (which can be called the East Cap) covers 10 million km² while the West Cap is 5 times smaller and 2 times thinner. The glaciers of the Peninsula and all the floating platforms of the ice sheet extensions total only 2 million km².

The ice is not immobile: it flows towards the sea at a speed of a few millimeters per year in the heart of the land and up to 4 km per year at the periphery. This slow flow is carried out by deformation of the layers, like a wax: the ice particles "sink" while moving. Locally, the glaciers, real drains of the ice cap installed in the hollows of the relief, are much faster: melt water separates the ice from the rock, thus facilitating the sliding. The largest glacier (in the world) is the Lambert, in the Prince Charles Mountains: it is 400 km long and 40 km wide. The fastest is the Shirase, which advances more than 5 meters per day. On average, the snow that falls in the center of the continent takes 500,000 years to reach the sea. During these movements, if the ice passes over a bump in the base, the surface cracks into a set of crevasses about forty meters deep; covered with bridges of snow, these abysses set terrible traps for explorers. Today, the movements of the cap and its structure are studied by satellite. As in mountain glaciers, the transported rocks accumulate in the form of moraines. The search for meteorites fallen from space and concentrated in certain places by the ice has provided exceptional collections.