Sea Ice Deformation Is Not Scale Invariant Over Length Scales Greater Than a Kilometer

7 pages, 3 figures.-- Data Availability Statement: The GNSS data used in this study is archived at The Arctic Data Center (Elosegui et al., 2023; Hutchings et al., 2023). In March and April 2021, buoys were deployed in the Beaufort Sea, Arctic Ocean, to measure sea-ice horizontal deformation over sp...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hutchings, Jennifer K., Bliss, Angela C., Mondal, Dhiman, Elosegui, Pedro
Other Authors: Office of Naval Research (US), Agencia Estatal de Investigación (España), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas https://ror.org/02gfc7t72
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: American Geophysical Union 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10261/360291
https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GL108582
https://doi.org/10.13039/501100011033
https://doi.org/10.13039/100000006
Description
Summary:7 pages, 3 figures.-- Data Availability Statement: The GNSS data used in this study is archived at The Arctic Data Center (Elosegui et al., 2023; Hutchings et al., 2023). In March and April 2021, buoys were deployed in the Beaufort Sea, Arctic Ocean, to measure sea-ice horizontal deformation over spatial scales that had not been previously achieved. Geodetic-quality position measurements allowed measurements of strain-rate over lengths from about 200 m to 2 km. Conventional ice-drifters extended spatial coverage up to about 100 km. Past studies find there is multi-fractal behavior for horizontal sea-ice deformation from 10 to 1,000 km. Our results demonstrate that such behavior does not hold when including spatial scales below 10 km. We find that sea-ice deformation is not scale invariant between the scale of individual sea-ice floes and aggregates of floes. Therefore, we cannot expect the same physical laws or forcing to describe sea-ice kinematics over these regimes, nor can we assume log-log linear behavior for mean deformation. Using this scaling behavior as a metric to validate models that resolve sea ice floes and their interactions is hence not recommended The Sea Ice Dynamics Experiment (SIDEx), which included the 2021 ice camp in the Beaufort Sea, was funded by the Office of Naval Research Grant N000141912604 and N000141912605. This work acknowledges the “Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence” accreditation (CEX2019-000928-S) funded by AEI https://doi.org/10.13039/501100011033 Peer reviewed