Yearly Freeze and Melt Cycle
Sea ice freezes and melts due to a combination of factors, including the age of the ice, air temperatures, and solar insolation. During the winter the area of the Arctic Ocean covered by sea ice increases, usually reaching a maximum extent during the month of March. The area covered in sea ice then decreases, reaching its minimum extent in September most years. First-year ice melts more easily than older ice for two reasons: 1) First-year ice is thinner than older ice, since the process of congelation growth has had less time to operate; and 2) first-year ice is less permeable than older ice, so summer meltwater tends to form deeper ponds on the first-year ice surface than on older ice, and deeper ponds mean lower albedo and thus greater solar energy capture.
Read more about this topic: Ice Drift
Famous quotes containing the words yearly, freeze, melt and/or cycle:
“What is last year’s snow to me,
Last year’s anything? The tree
Budding yearly must forget
How its past arose or set—”
—Countee Cullen (1903–1946)
“Ice doesn’t freeze three feet thick over night.”
—Chinese proverb.
“O God, that one might read the book of fate,
And see the revolution of the times
Make mountains level, and the continent,
Weary of solid firmness, melt itself
Into the sea.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.”
—Robert M. Pirsig (b. 1928)