During the Antarctic summer, air temperatures get warm enough to melt snow and ice on the surface of the great ice sheets that make up around 99% of Antarctica. This melted water collects to form thousands of lakes around the edges of this vast continent. Most of these lakes form on gigantic platforms of floating ice called ice shelves, which extend out from the continent into the sea.
Lakes forming on the surface of these ice shelves can sometimes cause them to break up. The most famous example is the collapse of Larsen B ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula, which shattered entirely over a matter of weeks in 2002.
