Reports on ice caves in literature from the twelfth to the middle of the twentieth century

The main goal of this paper is to summarize the history and the progress of ice cave research in the northern hemisphere as an introduction to the following papers about modern research in the U.S. We focus on the earliest descriptions of ice caves starting from the twelfth century, a cave with ice in India, as well as the beginning of modern ice cave research in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Moreover, we give a short overview of the different theories about ice caves over the course of time. The article is an introduction to the much younger ice cave research in the U.S., which will be the topic of a second paper in this journal.