With the warming climate, ice masses on Earth are expected to increasingly contribute to a rising sea level. As for any material, the ice bodies’ temperature is a key variable to change the material’s properties, especially the rheology. In the case of ice in natural environments on Earth, temperature is always close to the material’s melting point. Therefore ice can be regarded as a ‘hot material’ (homologous temperatures T/T_m ca. 0.7 to 0.9). This means that recrystallization plays a decisive role in governing the state and thus the behaviour of the material, as it continuously resets the mechanical properties. Recrystallization as a set of control mechanisms has been recognized and interpreted in many ice cores in the last decades, and certain recrystallization regimes have been assigned to special ice-sheet depth ranges. This assignment was based on microstructure observations (mainly grain size) and estimated boundary conditions (temperature and stress/strain amounts) which change systematically with depth. To generalize the use of recrystallization regimes we decouple their occurrence from the ice-sheet depth information and connect them directly to the activators and causes: strain rate and temperature.