Earth & SkyGreek → English
Cryosphere
/ˈkraɪəsfɪr/noun
All the frozen water on Earth taken together: ice sheets, glaciers, sea ice, snow and frozen ground.
The Greek roots
κρύος
krýos
icy cold, frost
σφαῖρα
sphaîra
ball, sphere
Literally: “frost sphere”
The story of the word
Antoni Dobrowolski, a Polish scientist who had wintered in the Antarctic aboard the Belgica, proposed the term in 1923 for the frozen part of the planet treated as one system rather than a list of separate features. κρύος is icy cold, the root behind κρύσταλλος and so behind crystal. The word stayed obscure until satellites made it possible to measure the thing it names.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 20th century
Same family
cryogeniccryonicscrystalatmosphere
In a sentence
Most of the cryosphere by volume sits in the Antarctic ice sheet.
The report tracks the cryosphere as a single indicator.