Study tracks the breakup of Arctic summer sea ice

As sea ice begins to melt back toward its late September minimum, it is being watched as never before. Scientists have put sensors on and under ice in the Beaufort Sea for an unprecedented campaign to monitor the summer melt.

This has never been done at this level, over such a large area and for such a long period of time.
    - Craig Lee

The international team, which includes Professor Peter Wadhams from Cambridge’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, hopes to figure out the physics of the ice edge in order to better understand and predict open water in Arctic seas.

“This has never been done at this level, over such a large area and for such a long period of time,” said Craig Lee, an oceanographer at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory. “We’re really trying to resolve the physics over the course of an entire melt season.”

The project is funded by the US Office of Naval Research. It includes scientists from the Naval Postgraduate School, the Naval Research Laboratory, Cambridge University, Yale University, Laboratoire d’Oceanographie de Villefranche, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the British Antarctic Survey, the Scottish Association for Marine Science and the Korean Polar Research Institute.

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Image: The marginal ice zone – the region between solid ice and open water
Credit: Eric Regehr, US Fish and Wildlife Service

Story courtesy University of Washington


Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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