An international team of scientists say it has placed sensitive instruments both above and below Arctic ice in the region's Beaufort Sea to monitor summer ice melt in unprecedented detail.
The project, led by researchers from the University of Washington, is funded through the U.S. Office of Naval Research to study the effect weather has on the region's ice cover and its melting, which is usually constant right through the month of September when it reaches its lowest cover.
"We're really trying to resolve the physics over the course of an entire melt season," UW oceanographer and study principle investigator Craig Lee says.
The science team conducting the Marginal Ice Zone project includes researchers from the United States, Great Britain, France and Korea.
The sensor network was put in place in March, when the ice cover was of sufficient thickness for a plane carrying the scientists and their equipment to land.
The team placed four sensors in a line extending from south to north for almost 200 miles.
"This has never been done at this level, over such a large area and for such a long period of time," Lee says.
The researchers say their sensors will measure characteristics of the ocean, atmosphere and the region's ice sheets, with particular attention paid to the marginal ice zone, the transition region between open ocean water and solid ice cover that is just now forming along the northern coasts of Canada and Alaska.
That's the zone where an ice sheet experiences the impact of ocean waves hitting it, which generally leads to the sheet breaking up and the pieces moving into the open water, increasing the force of subsequent impacts on the still intact portions of the ice cover.
As the ice sheet retreats, it exposes more open water that absorbs more solar radiation, the researchers explain, which can in turn lead to faster and more extensive ice melt.
"As there is more and more open water in the summer, the processes that control the evolution of the sea ice are changing," says Luc Rainville, another UW oceanographer.
In addition to the network of sensors, the state and extent of the ice cover will be monitored using satellite images, the researchers say.
In August, Lee will join the crew of a Korean icebreaker to place an additional set of instruments intended to study how temperature and water chemistry affect microscope marine life that lives under, in and on the Arctic ice.
