One tip of the triangular major wing curled up where it had stabbed against rock-hard ice.

Scientists at the University of Arizona, who designed the full-scale prototype of the five-foot-long metal probe, said the tests proved the projectile would penetrate rock-hard ice.

But my ice axe was outside with the others, sunk in the deepening snow and rock-hard ice, with about a hundred feet of spidersilk climbing rope lashed around it and over the tent and back again.

It even melted the rock-hard ice beneath it.

The land was cold rock-hard ice, rippling in long, low undulations that might have been seasonal snowdrifts millions of years ago, when the Lyrae twins were bigger and brighter.

But the ovoid is coated in layers of dirty, rock-hard ice, with all kinds of pebbles and grains and-and junk mixed up.

One afternoon as he was carrying a load up the Lhotse Face he lost his purchase on the rock-hard ice and fell more than 2,000 feet to the bottom of the wall.

I saw toddlers tumbling around on the rock-hard ice as though they were in a sandpit and skating couples pushing prams around the frozen tracks.

A slip here and he would tumble twenty feet to the rock-hard ice below.

A photo taken two years ago by Mr. Kobalenko of the same valley shows the glacier has receded, with shale and gravel where rock-hard ice used to be.