A study was conducted to measure the biogeochemical characteristics of freshwater plumes underlying Baltic Sea land-fast ice, and the overlying sea ice. A 40-km long transect was conducted in the northern Baltic Sea in March 2003, following a freshwater plume from its source into the fully mixed open-sea area. The spreading of river outflow below the ice resulted in a well-stratified low-salini...

The glaciation time of a mixed-phase cloud due to the Wegener–Bergeron–Findeisen mechanism is calculated using an adiabatic one-dimensional numerical model for the cases of zero, ascending, descending and oscillating vertical velocities. The characteristic values of the glaciation time are obtained for different concentrations of ice particles and liquid-water content. Steady state is not possi...

Ice-stream dynamics are strongly controlled by processes taking place at the ice/bed interface where subglacial water both lubricates the base and saturates any existing, underlying sediment. Large parts of the former Eurasian ice sheet were underlain by thick sequences of soft, marine sediments and many areas are imprinted with geomorphological features indicative of fast flow and wet basal co...

Rapid Arctic warming is associated with important water cycle changes: sea ice loss, increasing atmospheric humidity, permafrost thaw, and water-induced ecosystem changes. Understanding these complex modern processes is critical to interpreting past hydrologic changes preserved in paleoclimate records and predicting future Arctic changes. Cyclones are a prevalent Arctic feature and water vapor ...

Antarctic ice shelves are the floating extensions of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, covering around 40% of the continental shelf. The cavities beneath the ice shelves are important to the climate system through their contribution to the production of the globally important Antarctic Bottom Water. However, they remain some of the most difficult areas of the world ocean to access. Many of the processes...

[1] The abnormal spikes detected in some CO and CO2 polar ice core records indicate persistent chemical activity in glacial ice. Since CO and CO2 spikes are correlated, and their amplitudes scale with reported CO/CO2 yields for the photolysis of dissolved natural organic matter, a common photochemical source is implicated. Given that sufficient actinic radiation is constantly generated througho...

In this study, we present the first comprehensive analyses of the diversity and distribution of marine protist (micro-, nano-, and picoeukaryotes) in the Western Fram Strait, using 454-pyrosequencing and high-pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC) at five stations in summer 2010. Three stations (T1; T5; T7) were influenced by Polar Water, characterized by cold water with lower salinity (<33) and...

Recent observations of summer Arctic sea ice over the satellite era show that record or near-record lows for the ice extent occurred in the years 2002–05. To determine the physical processes contributing to these changes in the Arctic pack ice, model results from a regional coupled ice–ocean model have been analyzed. Since 1988 the thickness of the simulated basinwide ice thinned by 1.31 m or 4...

Since the launch of ENVISAT satellite in 2002, the Radar Altimetry Mission provides systematic altimeter observations of the Earth surface. The ENVISAT Geophysical Data Records products contain, over all type of surfaces, altimeter ranges derived from four specialized retrackers: Ocean, Ice-1, Ice-2 and Sea-Ice retracker. Among the different goals of the ENVISAT Mission, one directly concerns l...

We present a local order parameter based on the standard Steinhardt-Ten Wolde approach that is capable both of tracking and of driving homogeneous ice nucleation in simulations of all-atom models of water. We demonstrate that it is capable of forcing the growth of ice nuclei in supercooled liquid water simulated using the TIP4P/2005 model using over-biassed umbrella sampling Monte Carlo simulat...