Search results
But you may be struggling to understand some of the finer details of melting ice, such as the difference between icebergs and ice floe. An iceberg is a large mass of freshwater ice that has broken off of a glacier or an ice shelf. An ice floe is a large, flat pack of floating ice.
Fast ice, or land-fast ice, refers to the large, solid ice sheets that are attached to land. The pack ice consists of the smaller, free-floating pieces of sea ice. They may have formed independently, or may have broken off from the fast ice (Figure 14.1.3).
While it is true that both glaciers and ice floes are large masses of ice that can be found in arctic regions, there is a major difference between them. Basically, glaciers originate on land, and ice floes form in open water and are a form of sea ice.
When strong winds in the Arctic and Antarctic regions force icebergs and sea ice away from the coasts and out to sea, areas of open water remain where air and water are in direct contact with each other. These areas are called coastal polynyas, and they are the places where sea ice is created.
1 sty 2010 · Boas’ list is particularly thin in the “young ice,” “ice floes/drifting ice,” and “spring melting, breakup” categories, when compared with Erdmann’s dictionary of 1864 and several modern ice vocabularies collected for the SIKU project (Table 16.1).
Ice floe refers to the basic element of drift ice, characterized by granular ice floes that move on the sea surface as a two-dimensional system. AI generated definition based on: Encyclopedia of Ocean Sciences (Second Edition), 2009
[2] Floating ice in polar seas and northern lakes is perpetually subject to wind and water stresses that drive their deformation. These forces, and their mediation by the ice itself, are responsible for creating the mosaic of indi-vidual ice sheets, or ‘‘floes’’ that characterize sea ice as it evolves dynamically and thermodynamically.
