Publication Date:
2018-01-11
Description:
Arctic sea ice has displayed significant thinning as well as an increase in drift speed in recent years.
Taken together this suggests an associated rise in sea ice deformation rate. A winter and spring expedition to
the sea ice covered region north of Svalbard–the Norwegian young sea ICE2015 expedition (N-ICE2015)—gave
an opportunity to deploy extensive buoy arrays and to monitor the deformation of the first-year and secondyear
ice now common in the majority of the Arctic Basin. During the 5 month long expedition, the ice cover
underwent several strong deformation events, including a powerful storm in early February that damaged the
ice cover irreversibly. The values of total deformation measured during N-ICE2015 exceed previously measured
values in the Arctic Basin at similar scales: At 100 km scale, N-ICE2015 values averaged above 0.1 d-1, compared to rates of 0.08 d-1 or less for previous buoy arrays. The exponent of the power law between the deformation length scale and total deformation developed over the season from 0.37 to 0.54 with an abrupt
increase immediately after the early February storm, indicating a weakened ice cover with more free drift of
the sea ice floes. Our results point to a general increase in deformation associated with the younger and thinner Arctic sea ice and to a potentially destructive role of winter storms.
Repository Name:
EPIC Alfred Wegener Institut
Type:
Article
,
isiRev
,
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
Format:
application/pdf
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