Fast ice
As fast ice is sea ice called fixedly attached to the shoreline is anchored.
It borders the mainland , islands and ice shelves , but it also forms on icebergs that have run aground or along sandbanks . In contrast to drift ice, solid ice remains where it was formed, often as a flat, undeformed surface that is not moved by wind and currents. On the other hand, it rises and falls with the tide. It can form directly from seawater or freeze together from floating ice floes . It extends from a few meters to hundreds of kilometers in shallow shelf seas such as the Laptev Sea , where in winter it extends from the Siberian mainland coast 500 km to the New Siberian Islands .
The size of the fixed ice is subject to seasonal fluctuations; it is often one year old, but it can also survive several melting periods and is then perennial. Very old and thick fast ice is called Sikussak ( Greenlandic : “Fjord ice like sea ice” ). In Nansensund and Sverdrup Channel in the Canadian Arctic Sikussak was found with a thickness of ten to twelve meters.
As a platform close to the coast, the fast ice is of great ecological importance. B. for the rearing of young animals .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b WMO Sea-Ice Nomenclature ( Memento from December 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive ).
- ↑ a b Festeis in the Lexicon of Geography on Spektrum.de, accessed on June 5, 2014.
- ↑ Jörg Bareiss: Freshwater input and fast ice in the East Siberian Arctic - results from ground and satellite observations as well as sensitivity studies with a thermodynamic fast ice model . In: Reports on polar and marine research , Vol. 442, 2003, p. 3.
- ↑ Peter Wadhams: Sikussak . In: Mark Nuttall (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Arctic . tape 3 . Routledge, New York and London 2003, ISBN 1-57958-436-5 , pp. 1911 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).