Andy Revkin of the New York Times said it best this morning in A Farewell to Ice: "Essentially, the mountain storehouses of frozen water that have shaped their history and culture, or that have provided a secure year-round source of water through modern times, are no longer secure."

It's a reference to a U.N. Environment Program report released early this week that found -- well, more like reiterated -- that glaciers are shrinking at record rates, and many could disappear within decades. The UN scientists studied 30 glaciers throughout the world and found that on average, each one shrank by 4.9 feet in 2006. Only one glacier, in Chile, experienced slight growth.

Most alarming is that the average rate of melting and thinning of the glacial ice almost tripled in 2006, up from 1.6 feet the year before. The report comes as countries prepare for the next round of UN meetings at the end of the month in Bangkok, where officials will work on a post-Kyoto treaty.

Now comes today's ice news, which unless you're in the oil exploration or marine shipping business, is equally disturbing. Federal scientists said that while the Arctic ice sheet experienced minor growth this winter, the recovery is something of an illusion. That's because not enough ice is freezing below sea level, which means we're likely to see a big summer melt similar to last year, when the fabled Northwest Passage connecting the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans became very much real.

NASA scientists said today that the Arctic ice sheet reached a maximum of 5.8 million square miles this winter, up 4 percent from last year, when the ice pack was 27 percent smaller than the previous record. The concern this year is that too much of the ice contains a high proportion of thin, salty ice.

"It may look OK on the surface, but it's like looking at a Hollywood movie set," said Walt Meier from the National Snow and Ice Data Center. "You see the facade of a building and it looks OK, but if you look behind it, there's no building there."