The next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change should deal with the “frightening” possibility that both Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets start melting at the same time, the chief U.N. climate scientist said Tuesday.

The panel, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore, has released four climate assessment reports, including summaries for policymakers that are approved by government representatives.

Though there are no firm plans for a fifth report, the panel is still inviting scientists to submit material on glaciers in both the far north and south, IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri said.

“My hope is in the next report, if there is one, will be able to provide much better information on the possibility of these two large bodies of ice possibly melting, in what seems like a frightening situation,” Pachauri said during a visit to Oslo.

Pachauri, who plans to visit Antarctica next week with Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, said evidence of global warming is most apparent at the poles, especially in the Arctic, where the climate panel says the melting of Greenland’s vast glaciers could cause a 13-foot rise in sea levels in coming centuries.

Less is known, he said, about the impact of global warming at the South Pole, where the West Antarctic ice sheet is a wasteland of ice and snow roughly the size of Texas.

“Unless you go to these places, you just don’t get a feeling for the reality,” Pachauri said. “You can read as much as you want on these subjects but it doesn’t really enter your system, you don’t really appreciate the enormity of what you have.”

If ice sheets at both poles should begin melting simultaneously, the results could be extreme, he said.

“Both Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheet are huge bodies of ice and snow which are sitting on land. If through a process of melting they collapse and are submerged in the sea, then we really are talking about sea level rises of several meters (yards),” he said.