Yearly Freeze and Melt Cycle
Sea ice freezes and melts due to a combination of factors, including the age of the ice, air temperatures, and solar insolation. During the winter the area of the Arctic Ocean covered by sea ice increases, usually reaching a maximum extent during the month of March. The area covered in sea ice then decreases, reaching its minimum extent in September most years. First-year ice melts more easily than older ice for two reasons: 1) First-year ice is thinner than older ice, since the process of congelation growth has had less time to operate; and 2) first-year ice is less permeable than older ice, so summer meltwater tends to form deeper ponds on the first-year ice surface than on older ice, and deeper ponds mean lower albedo and thus greater solar energy capture.
Read more about this topic: Sea Ice
Famous quotes containing the words yearly, freeze, melt and/or cycle:
“What is last year’s snow to me,
Last year’s anything? The tree
Budding yearly must forget
How its past arose or set—”
—Countee Cullen (1903–1946)
“No one thinks anything silly is suitable when they are an adolescent. Such an enormous share of their own behavior is silly that they lose all proper perspective on silliness, like a baker who is nauseated by the sight of his own eclairs. This provides another good argument for the emerging theory that the best use of cryogenics is to freeze all human beings when they are between the ages of twelve and nineteen.”
—Anna Quindlen (20th century)
“If we reason, we would be understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another’s; if we feel, we would that another’s nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart’s best blood. This is Love.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“Only mediocrities progress. An artist revolves in a cycle of masterpieces, the first of which is no less perfect than the last.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)