Because the glaciers melted from the bottom up, whenever the Hive clusters heated the planet's surface, glacier collapses occurred from time to time. Fortunately, the Hives themselves possessed extremely high structural strength and could ignore this.
Trickles flowed from cracks in the glaciers. Water dripped down from above, gathered along the outer sides of the Hives, and was then heated into vapor by the high temperatures.
When the ground-based Hives had covered one-third of their planned area, the first cumulonimbus cloud since the Ice Age appeared.
However, the thickening cumulonimbus cloud did not bring rain.
The Hives heated water into vapor. After the unceasing steam melted a passage through the upper ice layer leading to the very top of the ice sheet, it continued rising and became clouds.
The heat-rich clouds released vast amounts of heat at high altitude in one burst, condensed into ice crystals, and fell back to the surface.
Thus, the first precipitation after the thaw was not rain, but hail.
It was a process of alternating cold and heat. The hail carried upper-level cold air masses down to the surface, while the hot air remained above. At this point, the roles of the north and south poles became apparent.
Atmospheric circulation began to operate.
Under the effects of atmospheric circulation, the hot air was divided into countless portions and scattered across every part of the planet.
It seemed that the Hives' heating had become meaningless. The falling hail thickened the ice layers, while the hot air masses they produced were dispersed across the entire planet by atmospheric circulation, making the warming effect negligible.
However, some things could not be viewed that way. They required a different perspective. This might not have been the fastest way to see warming results, but it was the gentlest.
The existence