Ice seals overwintering in the Bering Sea are challenged with foraging, finding mates, and maintaining breathing holes in a dark and ice covered environment. Due to the difficulty of studying these species in their natural environment, very little is known about how the seals navigate under ice. Here we identify specific environmental parameters, including components of the ambient background s...

We report for the first time on the discovery of calcium carbonate crystals as ikaite (CaCO3·6H2O) in sea ice from the Arctic (Kongsfjorden, Svalbard) as confirmed by morphology and indirectly by X-ray diffraction as well as XANES spectroscopy of its amorophous decomposition product. This finding demonstrates that the precipitation of calcium carbonate during the freezing of sea ice is not rest...

Ice may form by both homogeneous and heterogeneous freezing nucleation processes in clouds at temperatures below -3 5øC. Most investigations have focused on the former process. This paper presents results from adiabatic parcel model calculations that include the effects of both freezing processes in unactivated solution droplets. Uncertainties in predicting the homogeneous freezing rates are di...

[1] Ice-associated phytoplankton blooms in the southeastern Bering Sea can critically impact the food web structure, from lower tropic level production to marine fisheries. By coupling pelagic and sea ice algal components, our 1-D ecosystem model successfully reproduced the observed ice-associated blooms in 1997 and 1999 at the NOAA/PMEL mooring M2. The model results suggest that the ice-associ...

Most of the Southern Ocean (SO) is marginally stably stratified and thus prone to enhanced convection and possibly bottom-water formation whenever the upper ocean is cooled or made more saline by ice formation. Sea ice modifies the heat and freshwater fluxes, which in turn constitute a critical surface condition in this sensitive region of intense vertical exchange. The authors investigate the ...

Ice/frost formation on the Space Shuttle cryogenic propel 1 ant tanks presents a different problem from that of past launch vehicles. Lift off weight addition has been the primary concern on past launch vehicles. The primary ice/frost concern on the Shuttle vehicle is damage to the Orbiter Thermal Protection System due to ice/frost impact. The approach used to arrive at a solution to this uni­ ...

Mass-balance analysis of the Greenland ice sheet based on surface elevation changes observed by the European Remote-sensing Satellite (ERS) (1992–2002) and Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) (2003–07) indicates that the strongly increased mass loss at lower elevations (<2000m) of the ice sheet, as observed during 2003–07, appears to induce interior ice thinning at higher elevation...

The summer extent of the Arctic sea-ice cover has decreased in recent decades and there have been alterations in the timing and duration of the summer melt season. These changes in ice conditions have affected the partitioning of solar radiation in the Arctic atmosphere–ice–ocean system. The impact of sea-ice changes on solar partitioning is examined on a pan-Arctic scale using a 25 km! 25 km E...