Rare 'Dragon-Skin' Ice Spotted During Antarctic Research Voyage
By Kacey Deamer, Staff Writer | May 10, 2017 11:34am ET
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Ice that looks like a dragon's scales may sound like something from an episode of "Game of Thrones," but researchers recently observed the rare type of sea ice known as "dragon skin" in Antarctica.
Scientists aboard the U.S. icebreaker research vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer recently sailed to an Antarctic polynya — areas of open water that act as ice factories — to study the process of ice formation during the autumn-winter season. The "dragon-skin" sighting was an early highlight of the expedition, because the rare ice formation had not been seen in Antarctica since 2007, the researchers said.
Dragon skin occurs when strong "katabatic" winds — downslope winds that exist only over icy regions — continually lift the polynya's surface ice, subsequently freezing the water below, according to Guy Williams, a polar oceanographer from the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania in Australia. This cycle produces 10 times more than the average amount of sea ice formed in the coastal polynyas, Williams said. [Collapsing Beauty: Image of Antarctica's Larsen Ice Shelf]
"Imagine your standard ice-cube tray, filled once. After a week, you get one tray of ice cubes. But if you empty and refill the tray each night, you get so much more," Williams said in a statement. "That is what the katabatic winds are doing in the polynya, removing the ice, exposing the water and making more ice form."
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