The physics of premelted ice and its geophysical consequences

TLDR

Ice serves as an accessible laboratory for studying phase‑transition phenomena, including premelting, and its ubiquity makes it relevant to Earth and planetary sciences. The review seeks to explain the physics of ice premelting and its connections to other condensed‑matter materials. The authors analyze premelting behavior in ice, comparing it with analogous phenomena in familiar solids.

Abstract

The surface of ice exhibits the swath of phase-transition phenomena common to all materials and as such it acts as an ideal test bed of both theory and experiment. It is readily available, transparent, optically birefringent, and probing it in the laboratory does not require cryogenics or ultrahigh vacuum apparatus. Systematic study reveals the range of critical phenomena, equilibrium and nonequilibrium phase-transitions, and, most relevant to this review, premelting, that are traditionally studied in more simply bound solids. While this makes investigation of ice as a material appealing from the perspective of the physicist, its ubiquity and importance in the natural environment also make ice compelling to a broad range of disciplines in the Earth and planetary sciences. In this review we describe the physics of the premelting of ice and its relationship with the behavior of other materials more familiar to the condensed-matter community. A number of the many tendrils of the basic phenomena as they play out on land, in the oceans, and throughout the atmosphere and biosphere are developed.