More and more I am leaning towards chucking the prologue. Everything in my prologue is also in my book. All my prologue does is set up the reader for what the book is about and why do I want to give away all that information in the prologue when the meat and potatoes is in the novel itself, complete with action, history and conflict? Thanks Wolfe for setting me straight. Now I need to rework those first two chapters, they are so much weaker than the last two.
As for the ice sheets, because the novel I wrote is historical fiction I had to work many factual events such as, Warsaw ghetto uprising, concentration camps, news reports, speeches etc. As Matt said, I did it mostly through dialogue. The news reports and speeches were introduced through a hidden radio which the MC's huddled around. I tried my best to build the facts into the story so they wouldn't be standalone boring information.