Tag: sea ice
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Sea Ice: Crack Safety
Water ice is a curious material: though apparently a solid, it can nevertheless flow, bend, and wrinkle. The mile-thick Antarctic ice cap is very gradually flowing out to the edges of the continent, through the mountains in glaciers, and when those glaciers leave their channels they spread out like hot fudge (only much slower). Most…
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Sea Ice Basics
Antarctica is, as we all know, a continent of ice. But the ice isn’t just the ice caps and glaciers on the continent itself – it extends off the coast in all directions as the Southern Ocean seasonally freezes over. This fringe of frozen sea gives the penguins a place to escape their predators and…