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scpg02

Icy calculations on a hot topic

Icy calculations on a hot topic

Mathematics of ice to aid global warming forecasts

Contact: Lee Siegel
leesiegel@ucomm.utah.edu
801-581-8993
University of Utah

Quote:
University of Utah mathematicians have arrived at a new understanding of how salt-saturated ocean water flows through sea ice – a discovery that promises to improve forecasts of how global warming will affect polar icepacks.

In the current issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters, math Professor Ken Golden and colleagues show that brine moving up or down through floating sea ice follows “universal transport properties.”

“It means that almost the exact same formulas describing how water flows through sedimentary rocks in the Earth's crust apply to brine flow in sea ice, even though the microstructural details of the rocks are quite different from sea ice,” says Golden, who currently is on an Australian research ship in Antarctica.


http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-09/uou-ico091007.php
billiards

Sweet, that'd just be Darcy's Law then: q=-Ki. Which is not that surprising considering that, for low Reynold's Numbers, it is a law to describe the flow of fluids through porous media.

With ice of course, in practice it wouldn't be that simple to apply, because as the sea ice melts and reforms throughout the seasons its permeability, as well as the hydraulic gradient would be constantly changing.

It's interesting none-the-less, to note that Darcy's law is very similar in for to Ohm's law V=IR, which describes the flow of electric current through a conductor.

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