The circuits seem fine, so Elsaify calls Martinez, who sits nearby, and says that probe 10—slated for deployment the next day—is ready to be sealed. Martinez grabs the circuitry block and places it inside the special capsule that will protect the electronics from water and ice. But as he presses the two halves together, he notices that they don't quite close. "This is the kind of thing you design on the computer and it looks fine, but when you go to put it together..." Martinez says, pausing as he pops the case open to look inside. The problem, he concludes, is that the group replaced some of the sensors with slightly larger ones, and the case is now not closing perfectly, its halves separated by about 2 millimeters.

Martinez and Elsaify attempt to rearrange the electronics—to no good effect. They then discuss shaving the inside of the case but decide that they'd end up punching a hole in it. They also study the possibility of changing the antenna's position, but nothing works. After nearly 2 hours of frustrated attempts to close the troublesome capsule, Martinez makes an executive decision: "We'll have to trim the antenna."

With diagonal cutters he lops off a millimeter-thick slice of the antenna's plastic cap, revealing a coiled copper wire inside. He tries to close the case, but it still doesn't fit together. He goes ahead and trims one more piece—plastic and copper fragments flying meters away—and the two parts finally close.

The problem now is to determine how the shortened antenna will affect the probe's communications capabilities. Pure ice is not much of a problem for radio signals, Martinez tells me, but water strongly absorbs them, and the Briksdalsbreen is full of puddles and streams. To assess the situation, Martinez calls on Gang Zou, another postdoc in the group. The Chinese radio engineer sets the probe to broadcast some test data and reaches over to the spectrum analyzer. It shows a 433-megahertz signal at 2 milliwatts of power—the probe's transmission. It's not tremendously strong, but the researchers conclude it's enough for sending data through tens of meters of ice.

With all the electronics tests completed, the probe is ready for the final touch: using superglue and epoxy, Martinez seals the case. It's 1 a.m., and probe 10 has finally been made whole.

Earth has more than 160 000 glaciers. Scientists study them because they are an integral part of our climatic system, affecting and being affected by it. Today, with the rise of global surface temperatures, the overall trend is of "continuous if not accelerated glacier melting," according to the World Glacier Monitoring Service, in Zurich, Switzerland, which maintains the largest database on the subject.

By the end of this century, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects that sea level will rise by 11 to 77 centimeters. Most of the increase will be due to thermal expansion of the water, but glacial melting is expected to contribute a significant portion—as much as 30 percent—of the total. The disappearance of ice masses may have a serious socioeconomic impact not only on low-lying coastal areas but also on regions whose hydrology and vegetation depend on glaciers.

But if the shrinkage is widespread, it's not universal. It turns out that the Briksdalsbreen and other glaciers in this part of Norway were not melting—they were growing. During the 1990s, the Briksdalsbreen and its neighbors the Bergsetbreen, the Bødalsbreen, and the Nigardsbreen have all experienced growth at speeds that surprised many researchers. In 1994 alone the front of the Briksdalsbreen charged ahead 80 meters, about four times its annual average. If you visited the glacier that year, you could actually see it slowly advancing, its front bulldozing plants, rocks, and everything else in front of it.

Why have these glaciers grown while so many others are melting? The answer: precipitation. During the early 1990s this region experienced consecutive winters with unusually high humidity, with some years registering almost double the usual precipitation, which, at the top of the glaciers, fell as snow. "Global warming means both temperature rise and increase of precipitation in coastal areas due to higher evaporation," says Stefan Winkler, a geography professor at the University of Würzburg, in Germany, who has been tracking Norwegian glaciers. "And high winter precipitation means nothing else but high snow accumulation." It was this extra dollop of snow that made the glaciers grow.

Scientists suspect, however, that this phenomenon alone is not enough to explain the Briksdalsbreen's spectacular advances in years like 1994. Something else was also in action. The likely candidate is a large-scale fluctuation of atmospheric pressure that affects the climate of most of the Northern Hemisphere. "It's called the North Atlantic Oscillation," says Atle Nesje, a geology professor at the University of Bergen. One of its effects is that when pressure gets unusually low over Iceland and unusually high over the western part of the Mediterranean Sea, a mass of moist air flows into northwest Europe. "The result is a lot of precipitation in western Norway," he says.