need to explicitly copy the arrayfor example arr[ : copy(with higher dimensional arraysyou have many more options in two-dimensional arraythe elements at each index are no longer scalars but rather one-dimensional arraysin [ ]arr np array([[ ][ ][ ]]in [ ]arr [ out[ ]array([ ]thusindividual elements can be accessed recursively but that is bit too much workso you can pass comma-separated list of indices to select individual elements so these are equivalentin [ ]arr [ ][ out[ ] in [ ]arr [ out[ ] see figure - for an illustration of indexing on array figure - indexing elements in numpy array in multidimensional arraysif you omit later indicesthe returned object will be lowerdimensional ndarray consisting of all the data along the higher dimensions so in the array arr in [ ]arr np array([[[ ][ ]][[ ][ ]]]in [ ]arr out[ ]array([[ ]the numpy ndarraya multidimensional array object www it-ebooks info