Sea ice is frozen seawater. Because ice is less dense than its melt, sea ice floats. Sea ice covers about 7% of the Earth’s surface, or about 12% of the world’s oceans. In the North, it is found in the Arctic Ocean, in areas just below it and in other cold oceans, seas and gulfs; in the Antarctic, it occurs in various areas around Antarctica (the continent). Due to the combined action of winds, currents and air temperature fluctuations, sea ice expanses are very dynamic. In the fall and winter, the ice grows progressively thicker, defining floes of various sizes that collide against each other. This activity also goes on in the spring and summer, but during that time part of the ice melts. This ice may be contrasted with icebergs, which are chunks of ice shelves or glaciers that calve into the ocean. Unlike sea ice, which is saline, icebergs are made from fresh water. They may be enclosed within sea ice expanses and drift along with it.
Read more about Sea Ice: Types of Sea Ice, Formation of Sea Ice, Yearly Freeze and Melt Cycle, Monitoring and Observations, Modelling, Ecology, Relationship To Global Warming and Climate Change
Famous quotes containing the words sea and/or ice:
“What do the botanists know? Our lives should go between the lichen and the bark. The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind. We are still being born, and have as yet but a dim vision of sea and land, sun, moon, and stars, and shall not see clearly till after nine days at least.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Like the water, the Walden ice, seen near at hand, has a green tint, but at a distance is beautifully blue, and you can easily tell it from the white ice of the river, or the merely greenish ice of some ponds, a quarter of a mile off.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)