The physical structures of snow and sea ice in the Arctic section of 150°-180°W during the summer of 2010

Abstract

The physical structures of snow and sea ice in the Arctic section of 150°–180°W were observed on the basis of snow-pit, ice-core, and drill-hole measurements from late July to late August 2010. Almost all the investigated floes were first-year ice, except for one located north of Alaska, which was probably multi-year ice transported from north of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago during early summer. The snow covers over all the investigated floes were in the melting phase, with temperatures approaching 0 °C and densities of 295–398 kg/m3. The snow covers can be divided into two to five layers of different textures, withmost cases having a top layer of fresh snow, a round-grain layer in themiddle, and slush and/or thin icing layers at the bottom. The first-year sea ice contained about 7%–17% granular ice at the top. There was no granular ice in the lower layers. The interiormelting and desalination of sea ice introduced strong stratifications of temperature, salinity, density, and gas and brine volume fractions. The sea ice temperature exhibited linear cooling with depth, while the salinity and the density increased linearly with normalized depth from 0.2 to 0.9 and from 0 to 0.65, respectively. The top layer, especially the freeboard layer, had the lowest salinity and density, and consequently the largest gas content and the smallest brine content. Both the salinity and density in the ice basal layer were highly scattered due to large differences in ice porosity among the samples. The bulk average sea ice temperature, salinity, density, and gas and brine volume fractions were −0.8 °C, 1.8, 837 kg/m3, 9.3% and 10.4%, respectively. The snow cover, sea ice bottom, and sea ice interior show evidences of melting duringmid-August in the investigated floe located at about 87°N, 175°W.