Elongated, fractal-like water-ice grains are observed to form spontaneously when water vapor is injected into a weakly ionized laboratory plasma formed in a background gas cooled to an astrophysically relevant temperature. The water-ice grains form in 1–2 minutes, levitate with regular spacing, and are aligned parallel to the sheath electric field. Water-ice grains formed in plasma where the ne...

Phytoplankton blooms over Arctic Ocean continental shelves are thought to be restricted to waters free of sea ice. Here, we document a massive phytoplankton bloom beneath fully consolidated pack ice far from the ice edge in the Chukchi Sea, where light transmission has increased in recent decades because of thinning ice cover and proliferation of melt ponds. The bloom was characterized by high ...

The contribution of the Greenland ice sheet to sea-level rise has accelerated in recent decades. Subglacial lake drainage events can induce an ice sheet dynamic response--a process that has been observed in Antarctica, but not yet in Greenland, where the presence of subglacial lakes has only recently been discovered. Here we investigate the water flow paths from a subglacial lake, which drained...

BACKGROUND Ice swimming for 1 mile and 1 km is a new discipline in open-water swimming since 2009. This study examined female and male performances in swimming 1 mile ('Ice Mile') and 1 km ('1 km Ice event') in water of 5 °C or colder between 2009 and 2015 with the hypothesis that women would be faster than men. METHODS Between 2009 and 2015, 113 men and 38 women completed one 'Ice Mile' and ...

Winter storms in California's Sierra Nevada increase seasonal snowpack and provide critical water resources and hydropower for the state. Thus, the mechanisms influencing precipitation in this region have been the subject of research for decades. Previous studies suggest Asian dust enhances cloud ice and precipitation, whereas few studies consider biological aerosols as an important global sour...

Time series of ice draft from 2003 to 2012 from moored sonar data are used to investigate variability and describe the reduction of the perennial sea ice cover in the Beaufort Gyre (BG), culminating in the extreme minimum in 2012. Negative trends in median ice drafts and most ice fractions are observed, while open water and thinnest ice fractions (<0.3 m) have increased, attesting to the ablati...

[1] The formulation of suitable boundary conditions at the water-ice interface during ice formation (melting) is an important aspect of the sea-ice coupled model. The transfer of water and salt through the water-ice can be posed as different boundary conditions. Behavior of the model under these boundary conditions is illustrated through simple analytical models and a numerical model based on p...

The nature of microscopic particulates in meteoric and accreted ice from the Vostok ice core, is assessed in conjunction with existing ice core data to investigate the mechanism by which particulates are incorporated into refrozen lake water. Melted ice samples from a range of ice core depths were filtered through 0.2 μm polycarbonate membranes and secondary electron images were collected at ×5...

We propose that prior to the Younger Dryas period, the Arctic Ocean supported extremely thick multi-year fast ice overlain by superimposed ice and firn. We re-introduce the historical term paleocrystic ice to describe this. The ice was independent of continental (glacier) ice and formed a massive floating body trapped within the almost closed Arctic Basin, when sea-level was lower during the la...

During the period 2000–2005, we collected samples of englacial ice, vent water, frazil/anchor ice and stratified basal ice from warm-based outlet glaciers of Vatnajökull and Öræfajökull, Iceland, and analysed them for H, O and D. Results of H analyses show that the stratified basal ice contains H from atmospheric thermonuclear testing and is younger than the englacial ice. Results of the O and ...