Scaling aspects of the sea-ice-drift dynamics and pack fracture

Abstract

Abstract.A study of the sea-ice dynamics in the periods of time prior to and during the cycles of basin-wide fragmentation of the ice cover in the Arctic Ocean is presented. The fractal geometry of the ice-sheets limited by leads and ridges was assessed using the satellite images, while the data on the correlated sea-ice motion were obtained in the research stations "North Pole 32" and "North Pole 33" established on the ice pack. The revealed decrease of the fractal dimension as a result of large-scale fragmentation is consistent with the localization of the fracture process (leads propagation). At the same time, the scaling properties of the distribution of amplitudes of ice-fields accelerations were insensitive to the event of sea-ice fragmentation. The temporal distribution of the accelerations was scale-invariant during "quiet" periods of sea-ice drift but disordered in the period of mechanical perturbation. The period of decorrelated (in time) ice-field motion during the important fracture event was interpreted as an inter-level transition in the hierarchic dynamical system. The mechanism of the long-range correlations in the sea-ice cover, including the fracture process, is suggested to be in relation with the self-organized oscillation dynamics inherent in the ice pack.

Experimental analysis of lateral impact on planar brittle material

“…The fragmentation process is a common phenomenon that is found both in natural [1,2,3,4,5,6,7] and industrial processes [8,9,10,11], and takes place on scales ranging from the collision of galaxies [1] and asteroids [2] to the breakup of heavy nuclei [6]. The underlying physics of the fragmentation phenomenon is very different for macroscopic and microscopic systems, since quantum effects have to be considered in the latter, and also because the mechanisms that lead to their breakup are not the same.…”

Dynamical model for competing opinions

“…the configurations are reached without the need of the external tuning of any parameter, and the power law suggests the existence of critical behavior. The self organized criticality (SOC) has been discussed in different places [16][17][18][19][20] and has been observed in many different systems [20][21][22][23][24]. In our case, this suggests that, on rare occasions, consensus would spontaneously be reached.…”

“…This is called self-organized criticality (SOC) and has been discussed in many different places [12,[22][23][24][25][26]. It has also been observed in a large diversity of systems [12,[22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30]. The asymptotic value of the power law exponent of the size distribution shown above lies within the values obtained with the random site percolation (RSP) whose exponent ranges from 2.05 for two-dimensional lattices [13] or 2.186 ± 0.002 for three-dimensional lattices [31] up to 2.5 for the Bethe lattice [13].…”

Interplay between linear, dissipative and permanently critical mechanical processes in Arctic sea ice

“…Later, the power law size distribution was found for lead patterns of any kinds, that is both for ice floes of regular geometry, such as parallelogram-like and diamond-like floes, and for "smoothed" (oval) floes typical for frost-free seasons (Weiss and Marsan, 2004;Chmel et al, 2005Chmel et al, , 2007. At the same time, the exponent β, in contrast to the parameter α, is not a universal constant: its absolute value depends on relative amounts of "small" and "large" floes in the total N. This is seen in Fig.…”