Global warming has made ice a hot topic, and one sizzling center of inquiry is in a warehouse-like complex in New England, where melting polar shores and shrinking glaciers are issues of urgent study.

In vast deep-freeze rooms at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, parka-clad scientists examine samples taken from Greenland and Antarctica, some of them icy, some made up of old, close-packed snow known as firn.

Another building creates cold-weather road surfaces and lets vehicles drive across them. Elsewhere on the base, researchers set up supermarket-size models of rivers and seashores to check the impact of ice and cold.

Recently, it has become a practical laboratory to monitor the effects of climate change in the Arctic, notably a way to keep ice and newly open water from eroding seaside communities.

"We've never had a shore protection system for the Arctic," said Leonard Zabilansky, a research civil engineer at the lab. "We've never had to." Now this protection is needed.

Because the lab is part of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, it focuses on both military and civilian consequences from climate change.

"Military tactical plans will need to reflect changes in seasonal extents of snow, ice and navigable weather and ground conditions," Jacqueline Richter-Menge, project manager at the lab, wrote in a statement at http://www.crrel.usace.army.mil/.

"Civilian agencies planning new infrastructure need to know how these changes affect their projects, and whether extreme events will have greater impacts over time."

Less Arctic ice could mean big changes in shipping, trade, ecosystems and security, and it has already prompted lab tests to keep marauding ocean ice from eroding Barrow, Alaska.

WIND-DRIVEN ICE

"The ice used to hold everything in place," said Zabilansky. Now much of the ice that used to shield coastal settlements year-round is seasonal and it is up to Zabilansky and other experts to try to solve the practical problems caused when polar ice disappears.

Temperatures in Barrow -- a U.S. outpost some 340 miles (547.2 km) north of the Arctic circle -- are frequently below zero F (-17.77C), so you'd think keeping ice frozen would be easy, but that is not always the case.

"The problem is that due to global warming, the volume of sea ice (in the Arctic Ocean) has decreased and it doesn't last from one season to the next," Zabilansky said, speaking at the lab and in a subsequent telephone interview.

When this seasonal ice melts in the summer, it creates an open-water pathway for ice further out on the ocean to gather speed and move toward shore, Zabilansky said. This ocean ice can be extremely destructive when it hits land.

"There's wind-driven ice that has room to accelerate," Zabilansky said. "We have to de-accelerate it before it gets to downtown."

So at a test basin at the lab, researchers built a large hump made of coarse gravel meant to block incoming ice before it reached shore. The ice picked up the stones and went over the top of the hump in simulations, Zabilansky said.

The next step is to bring in boulders nearly 6 feet (1.829 metres) in diameter in a test for a shoreline protection system for Barrow.

If this works, there will be at least one more challenge: these big rocks are relatively easy to get in New Hampshire, but they will have to be sent by barge from Nome if tests show they will be effective for Barrow.

This design might prove adaptable to other Arctic sites, Zabilansky added.