Arctic Sea Ice

As you learned in the DaisyWorld video, snow and ice reflect more sunlight and heat than a darker surface and therefore have a higher albedo. Water has a much lower albedo than ice. For example, a typical albedo for open ocean water is 0.06—reflecting only 6% of incoming radiation—whereas bare ice, with a typical albedo of 0.5, reflects 50%. Ice covered with snow has an even higher albedo, reflecting almost all of the light.

Watch the animation on the right, which illustrates the concept of ice albedo and what happens as ice begins to melt and more of the ocean becomes visible.

So what happens as the snow and ice in the Arctic begin to melt more due to warming temperatures?

Keyboard Shortcut	Action
Space	Pause/Play video playback
Enter	Pause/Play video playback
m	Mute/Unmute video volume
Up and Down arrows	Increase and decrease volume by 10%
Right and Left arrows	Seek forward or backward by 5 seconds
0-9	Fast seek to x% of the video.
f	Enter or exit fullscreen. (Note: To exit fullscreen in flash press the Esc key.
c	Press c to toggle captions on or off

As the Sun warms Earth, and ice melts, what happens to the incoming solar radiation? Click Arrange It and fill in the diagram to represent the feedback loop that results as ice melts.