Questions tagged [sea-ice]

Questions about frozen seawater, not about floating icebergs.

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22 votes
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Is there any explanation for the large amount of sea ice around Antarctica in 2014?

As can be seen from the below data, for the past year or so (2014), sea ice surrounding Antarctica has been well above normal. Currently, Antarctic sea ice is at an all-time record high for this time ...
DavePhD's user avatar
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19 votes
3 answers
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Why deep ocean didn't freeze during snowball Earth?

I know that at least twice in its history Earth was totally frozen. I also know that the last time it happened there were already life on Earth, and it survived. In deep water, under the ice, which ...
amorfis's user avatar
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18 votes
2 answers
818 views

Is this 70km crack in an ice shelf of Antarctica remarkable, or a regular occurrence?

I've just seen the LiveScience article 70-Mile-Long Crack Opens Up in Anatarctica. I'm not sure if the title is a bit sensational or not, the crack is in an ice shelf, not the continent of Antarctica. ...
uhoh's user avatar
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15 votes
1 answer
333 views

Naming convention for sea ice thickness per unit area of ice or ocean

When defining an area average of sea ice thickness, it is important to distinguish between an average taken over an ocean area $$h_1 = \sum \frac{\text{sea ice thickness (in area)}}{\text{area}_\text{...
BHF's user avatar
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13 votes
3 answers
3k views

Why have "ozone-depleting substances" led to a third of all global warming and half of arctic sea ice loss?

According to the Phys.org article "Ozone-depleting substances caused half of late 20th-century Arctic warming, says study" (emphasis added): A study published today in Nature Climate Change by ...
uhoh's user avatar
  • 7,074
13 votes
2 answers
610 views

Is Antarctic sea ice at record levels?

Every time I read a news article about Antarctic ice extent, I don't seem to have a clear answer as to what the deal is. If I look at the February sea ice extent from the National Snow and Ice Data ...
arkaia's user avatar
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13 votes
1 answer
196 views

How much of the underwater land masses within the arctic ocean is considered continental shelf?

Right now I'm in the middle of writing my master thesis which is about modelling the ocean bottom pressure (obp) under areas with sea-ice coverage. In most Oceanic General Circulation Model's (ogcm) ...
Julian Zimmermann's user avatar
9 votes
2 answers
493 views

Is the Arctic sea ice volume increasing?

According to the graph below, Arctic sea ice volume has been decreasing from 1979-2012: Though this graph from the ESA’s CryoSat satellite show that the volume of Arctic sea ice increased 50% from ...
blunders's user avatar
  • 4,601
9 votes
1 answer
132 views

How much of arctic ice is from snow fall versus frozen sea water?

How much of arctic ice is from snow fall versus frozen sea water? I presume arctic ice comes from both sources. Is there a way to tell how the ice was formed? In other words, if you made a core ...
Tyler Durden's user avatar
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9 votes
1 answer
151 views

Is the Arctic ice dissapearing faster than IPCC models say?

Are observations of Arctic sea ice in accord with what the IPCC forecasts says they should be? And as such is the ice reducing in an exponential or linear way? For instance, from https://www....
Jimmy Widdle's user avatar
9 votes
1 answer
898 views

How cold would the Earth have to be for the oceans to freeze entirely?

I imagine it is difficult for the ocean to freeze solid due to the low freezing point of salt water and the insulating effect of the formation of sea ice over the cool but still liquid ocean water. ...
Antarctica07's user avatar
8 votes
2 answers
338 views

Did the surfaces of the oceans freeze over entirely during the snowball Earth periods?

According to the snowball Earth theory, all of Earth froze over at least once (possibly twice) in the far past. However, Wikipedia says that there are opponents of the theory who state that tropical ...
HDE 226868's user avatar
7 votes
1 answer
198 views

Need help understanding this satellite image of Larson C ice shelf

The false color image below shows synthetic aperture radar imaging from ESA's Sentinel-1 satellite. The map from the 20-Jan-2017 BBC article Larsen ice crack continues to open up illustrates the same ...
uhoh's user avatar
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6 votes
1 answer
90 views

Were sub-sea river channels formed when the land was above sea level?

In this satellite pic, on the land is the Columbia river on the western side of North America. I was amazed to see the channel within the sea, more than 125 km long. Can it be concluded, based on ...
Ritesh Singh's user avatar
6 votes
1 answer
89 views

Observations of sea ice typology in the Arctic

What are the main datasets characterizing sea ice typology, thickness, density, "passability", presence of pressure ridges in the Arctic? Is it something that can be detected from the air or a space ...
Deer Hunter's user avatar
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6 votes
0 answers
466 views

How much of Earth's surface would be covered by water if all ice melted? [duplicate]

I'm trying to find how much water would be on the surface of Earth and how much surface would it cover (how much land will remain) if all the ice at the North and South Poles (and everywhere else) ...
theagouf's user avatar
5 votes
4 answers
2k views

Does melting sea ice rise the global sea level?

As sea ice is floating in oceans, it is currently occupying a volume of oceans. And also ice is less dense than water, and thus it has a greater volume with the same amount of mass compared to water. ...
Amir reza Riahi's user avatar
5 votes
2 answers
284 views

Is the Arctic sea ice disappearing in a linear or non-linear way?

I'd like help to understand these charts. They are charts of Sea Ice Volume. One is drawn with linear decline, the other has all sorts of curves fitted onto it. Why do we have these different line ...
Jimmy Widdle's user avatar
4 votes
1 answer
296 views

Is it possible to create ice in poles? [closed]

Is it possible that human can built under the poles a controlled system to create again artificial icebergs? In order keep tight the melting ice and reduce the sea level? Can this system impact the ...
Maria Georgali's user avatar
4 votes
0 answers
24 views

Sea-Ice thickness categories

In the Sea-Ice models they use the Sea-Ice thickness categories. An example is the SIS model of BCC CSM (http://forecast.bcccsm.ncc-cma.net/web/?ChannelID=37, https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/sea-ice-...
jnkosi's user avatar
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3 votes
2 answers
195 views

Is ice also created ín cold water of the oceans?

Salt water of the oceans could freeze into ice at a temperature of -1,8C. Now there is a lot ice on the poles but of all the floating ice how much is that a grown in and of the water itself? With ...
Marijn 's user avatar
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3 votes
1 answer
321 views

How can every ton of CO2 cost 3 square meters of summer sea ice per year - quantitatively?

The Science article The average U.S. family destroys a football field's worth of Arctic sea ice every 30 years states: Every additional metric ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) puffed into the atmosphere ...
uhoh's user avatar
  • 7,074
3 votes
0 answers
44 views

What are the central institutes that take care of Arctic research?

I am currently looking for data for a thesis. I wanted to ask which marine research institutes outside the European Union (USA, Canada, China, etc.) deal with the Arctic and/or the AMOC.
Weiss's user avatar
  • 1,906
2 votes
1 answer
437 views

Would freezing the ocean and storing the ice in the poles reduce effects of climate change or sea level?

Disclaimer I've read this question already on sending water to the north pole, south pole and glaciers, and I thought I'd give it my own take and see how technically possible it could be. Question As ...
user avatar
1 vote
2 answers
175 views

What are the approximate dimension of this iceberg? Any chance the ratio is 1:4:9?

From 17-Oct-2018 NASA ICE tweet: I'm curious of the actual dimensions, and if possible a complete photo. And curious in a scifi sort of way if they have a ratio of 1:4:9 From yesterday's #...
uhoh's user avatar
  • 7,074
1 vote
3 answers
174 views

How do we know the Arctic is just ice?

If I look at an Earth's map, the Arctic/North Pole always appears just like water. Evidently this is actually covered by ice, with an area depending on the time of the year. If this area is bigger ...
FriendlyLagrangian's user avatar
1 vote
1 answer
84 views

How reliable is sea-ice concentration (fraction) data in ERA-Interim?

I am using sea-ice data from the European Reanalysis from ECMWF (ERA Interim), but some grid cells over land have sea-ice information. Not a big issue so far, because spatial discretization must ...
ouranos's user avatar
  • 607
1 vote
0 answers
111 views

How serious is the issue of vast quantities of methane release from an ice-free Arctic?

A bunch of climate scientists claim that humans will go extinct by 2026, when humanity crosses the major tipping point known as "Arctic Blue Ocean Event (BOE)". According to the climate ...
Swarnim Khosla's user avatar
1 vote
0 answers
42 views

Are events like the Siberian heat wave factored into models of sea ice decline?

I've been looking at a lot of charts of Arctic Sea Ice lately, wondering when it will be gone, and whether the more extreme predictions are credible. When scientists come up with a chart that points ...
Jimmy Widdle's user avatar