Ice is a material that can flow like a very viscous liquid. In the polar ice sheets, it flows towards the oceans under its own weight. Knowing how fast the ice flows is of crucial importance to predict future sea level rises, particularly under changing climate conditions. Professor Paul Bons and Junior Professor Ilka Weikusat from the University of Tübingen’s Geosciences Department, working with scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, the University of Otago (New Zealand) and the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain), used flow velocities at the surface of the northern Greenland Ice Sheet for a new study now published in Geophysical Research Letters. These data from satellite images suggest that the polar ice is softer than scientists believed until now.