The Idiom of Ice

Studying Sea Ice in Svalbard

Frazil, pancake, slush, grease, shuga, nilas: this is the idiom of sea ice, an onomatopoeic vernacular that floats and fractures with the vitality and violence of the ice itself. From crystallization and evolution to decay and dissolution, sea ice is a physical phenomenon in flux, and the science of sea ice possesses a vast and varied vocabulary for characterizing it. The Inuit may have hundreds of words for snow, but modern scientists have a truly staggering number of terms for describing frozen water.

For two weeks at the International Sea Ice Summer School, on the island of Spitsbergen in the archipelago of Svalbard in Norway, my days are devoted to learning this language. Ninety-two graduate students from around the world have gathered here because sea ice is relevant to their studies in some significant way. Most are writing dissertations on sea ice but understand it only as it relates to their work. There are climate modellers who are clueless about how sea ice crystallizes and geophysicists who have never given ice algae a second thought. The goal of the summer school is for sea ice experts to present cutting-edge research in all disciplines, forcing students and experts alike to surface above the minutiae of their own specialties.

Through lectures by sea ice experts, we scrutinize sea ice from every possible perspective: from the past to the present and future, from small-scale crystal structures to global distribution patterns and puzzles. We learn that sea ice, solid as it seems, is technically a two-component mushy layer of ice crystals and brine inclusions. We are tutored in the thermodynamics of freezing and the mechanics of sea ice ridging. We study the role of melting sea ice as an amplifier of climate change and learn about the hardy life forms, great and small, that call sea ice home. The only aspect of sea ice that we don’t scrutinize is the substance itself.

Photos by Kate Harris

This entry was posted on Monday, November 1st, 2010 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Field Notes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. Add to del.icio.us.