Every year someone shows up here and starts claiming that sea ice is made of salt water and will melt until the temperature drops below -2C.
Can you drink melted sea ice?
New ice is usually very salty because it contains concentrated droplets called brine that are trapped in pockets between the ice crystals, and so it would not make good drinking water. As ice ages, the brine eventually drains through the ice, and by the time it becomes multiyear ice, nearly all of the brine is gone. Most multiyear ice is fresh enough that someone could drink its melted water. In fact, multiyear ice often supplies the fresh water needed for polar expeditions.
All About Sea Ice, Introduction :: National Snow and Ice Data Center
This time of year, almost all of the Arctic ice is fresh water ice.
Also from http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/quickfacts/icesheets.html
“Together, the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets contain more than 99 percent of the freshwater ice on Earth. The Antarctic Ice Sheet extends almost 14 million square kilometers (5.4 million square miles), roughly the area of the contiguous United States and Mexico combined. The Antarctic Ice Sheet contains 30 million cubic kilometers (7.2 million cubic miles) of ice. The Greenland Ice Sheet extends about 1.7 million square kilometers (656,000 square miles), covering most of the island of Greenland, three times the size of Texas. “
Take fresh ice and drop it in salt water at zero degrees. What happens?
Why does gritting the roads work even when the air temperature is below zero?
Because the grit is dark and absorbs light. Sea ice gets progressively fresher over time. Read the NSIDC link.
Salt isn’t dark, and it will melt ice at night.
Can you not parse a paragraph correctly? Steve answered the 2nd question, which had nothing to do with salt. You do realize that they throw different products on icy roads depending on temp, supply, costs, etc?
Are you actually asking why salt melts through ice? You can look it up, I’ll bet even Wikipedia knows this one.
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/aug/11/arctic-sea-ice-vanishing
Steven – You must be ready to bet on a record minimum?
Steve, the CT Ice area is already at 3.15 and the record is 2.9M.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.recent.arctic.png
you wanna bet make it interesting. A bet every day from now until day 250
that 2012 is lower than 1979-2011. Its day 221, that’s 29 bets.
http://meteomodel.pl/index.php/arcticiceart
I’m not really interested in the trajectory, because that is a function of the weather. The bet I am offering is JAXA minimum 2012 vs. 2007.
But melting season is over as you say, your gunna win 29 bets!
Reading comprehension troubles?
It is stunning and illustrative to me that Steve Mosher continually steps into this annual Sea-Ice Roulette.
Sea-Ice extent is as far from a controlled experiment as you can get. There are uncontrollable variables involved, the largest one being the wind. CO2 cannot be considered dominant except by a madman.
There is only one thing that can be stated as fact – sea-ice extent will grow half the year and melt the other half, as long as the Earth remains tilted on it’s axis in this orbital configuration yielding the long day/night cycle.
Either you know this full well and are just hitching a ride on a temporarily favorable bandwagon just for shits and giggles, or, you are really as dumb as the crowd you roll with – those snake oil salesman and their mindless sycophants.