Speaking at the University of Delaware as part of UD's William S. Carlson International Polar Year Events, Waleed Abdalati, head of NASA's Cryospheric Sciences Branch and one of the world's pre-eminent experts on the study of global climate change, highlights the critical role that ice plays in shaping our environment, illustrates through NASA imagery the "awakening of the sleeping giants" (a metaphor for the thinning of the world's polar ice sheets), and puts into visual perspective what the loss of this ice cover may mean for the world.