For any outdoor adventure, having a basic set of survival skills is absolutely necessary. For one, our natural instinct as a lover of the outdoors is to push past what we know and venture into new territory. However, the unknown can potentially be dangerous.

Winter survival often requires a new or amended set of skills. You need to be able to deal with harsher conditions and it can become hard to successfully perform even the most primitive skill of making fire.

Cold and damp weather makes it tricky to generate enough heat to produce fire. Luckily, even with the thickest covering of ice, it’s still possible to make fire without any advanced technologies or equipment.

Bizarrely, one of the ways to make fire during the winter is with a block of ice and we’re just about to show you how.

Don’t be fooled though, it’s not as easy as the above video may make it look. The idea is similar to starting a fire with a magnifying glass by concentrating the heat from the sun on one specific point.

The trouble with ice is that it’s not always completely clear, meaning it can contain air bubbles or dirt. It’s possible to work the ice into something that you can use, so that it’s well polished and clean.

If you have a knife with you, you can carve the ice to make it a round shape, and further use your hands to semi-melt the ice into a rounder shape. The key is to attempt to replicate a magnifying glass, making sure the ice is as free from impurities as possible.

Once you have your ice in the right shape for the job, you need to position it so that the sun beam is focussed on your target.