Our planet provides clues that geologists can interpret to tell us how our planet has responded to past climate change. These clues tell a story of massive mountains of ice—called ice sheets—that covered huge portions of our planet. These mountains of ice waxed and waned over millennia resulting in massive floods. We used to think that these glacial cycles (and floods) were driven by changes in atmospheric temperature. However, evidence shows that the long term growth and decay of these ice mountains were punctuated by abrupt, rapid ice sheet changes. These disintegration events involved the near total disintegration of large sections of ice sheets in as little as a few centuries resulting in meters or even tens of meters of sea level rise. Surprisingly, the onset of ice sheet disintegration is not correlated with atmospheric temperature; many events initiating during periods when atmospheric temperatures were extremely cold. Today, we have two mountains of ice remaining called the Greenland Ice Sheet and West Antarctic Ice Sheet. We are increasingly witnessing retreat, decay and disintegration in portions of these ice sheets on a scale that is unprecedented over the past ten thousand years and this has (re)awakened concern that irreversible ice sheet collapse, perhaps analogous to past ice sheet disintegration may have already begun. This concern has been amplified by modeling studies suggesting the near total disintegration of large portions of the ice sheets in as little as a few centuries. At present these predictions remain prophecies, clouded by uncertainty and affected by choices we as a society have yet to make. Here I will review some of the past changes hinted at by clues in the geological record and summarize more recent changes, like the ongoing retreat of the Larsen ice shelves in Antarctica that we are currently observing. I will also summarize how work that my group is doing increasingly points towards the ocean as the trigger for past, present and future ice sheet disintegration events. Finally, I will conclude by discussing the limitations of current ice sheet models and why this uncertainty coupled with intrinsic non-linearities in the dynamic system limits us to prophesying a range of discrete fates for the ice sheets, but unable to pick which of these fates is our destiny. Unfortunately, even the most optimistic of the fates we can foresee results in significant ice sheet decay, sea level rise and coastal flooding in the coming century.