{"id":37452,"date":"2026-10-04T06:52:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-04T10:52:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/?p=37452"},"modified":"2026-10-04T06:52:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-04T10:52:09","slug":"engineers-at-uc-riverside-simulated-2-000-floating-ice-floes-and-found-that-constant-collisions-between-neighbors-explain-why-arctic-sea-ice-spreads-more-slowly-than-the-wind-alone-would-push-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/engineers-at-uc-riverside-simulated-2-000-floating-ice-floes-and-found-that-constant-collisions-between-neighbors-explain-why-arctic-sea-ice-spreads-more-slowly-than-the-wind-alone-would-push-it\/37452\/","title":{"rendered":"Engineers at UC Riverside simulated 2,000 floating ice floes and found that constant collisions between neighbors explain why Arctic sea ice spreads more slowly than the wind alone would push it"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Why does Arctic sea ice<\/a> spread more slowly than the wind seems to suggest? A study led by researchers at the University of California, Riverside finds that repeated collisions between neighboring pieces of floating ice can explain several puzzling patterns in its movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bryan Shaddy and UCR researchers Alex Greaney and Bhargav Rallabandi published their findings September 10 in Physical Review Letters<\/a>. Their work links individual collisions to the movement of larger ice fields and could help improve climate models, although it does not yet predict exactly where warming will carry the Arctic\u2019s ice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why the wind is only part of the story<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Arctic sea ice includes countless floating slabs called floes, ranging from several meters to a few kilometers across. Wind pushes them over the ocean, but each piece travels through a neighborhood of other moving ice, sometimes with very little room to maneuver.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Ice
Ice floes coming together in the Arctic. (Photo: Pablo Clemente-Colon, National Ice Center \/ NOAA)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Scientists have struggled to explain why the observed spread of floes and the pattern of their changing speeds differ from simple models driven by wind. Proposed explanations have included ocean eddies<\/a>, unusual wind behavior, and fractures in the ice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The new research identifies collisions as a mechanism that can explain several observations together. \u201cWe showed that that\u2019s the only ingredient you need to explain these observations,\u201d said Bhargav Rallabandi, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at UCR, in the university\u2019s announcement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A floating version of grains in a silo<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The team approached the problem using ideas from granular materials, collections of separate objects such as grains moving through a silo. Their computer simulation represented 2,000 floes as rigid disks pushed by fluctuating winds, slowed by ocean drag, and able to collide with one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In densely packed ice, neighboring floes can collide much more often than the wind changes. Those encounters transfer motion between pieces while dissipating some of the energy supplied by the wind, shortening the distance each floe travels without interruption.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Think of trying to cross a crowded room, where your progress depends partly on the people around you. That is an imperfect everyday comparison, but it helps explain why knowing the push behind an individual floe is not enough to describe how a whole ice field spreads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three tests in an Arctic gateway<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The researchers compared their model with winter observations from the Fram Strait, the passage between Greenland<\/a> and Norway\u2019s Svalbard archipelago through which Arctic ice moves toward the Atlantic. They used local wind and ice data to test whether their simulated floes behaved like the real ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The model reproduced how floes spread, how their velocities were distributed, and how their motion fluctuated over time. In the published paper, the comparison of fluctuations extended from a few hours to 10 days, giving the researchers several timescales on which to check their explanation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Satellite
Broken sea ice in the Beaufort Sea seen by satellite in April 2018. (Image: NASA Earth Observatory \/ Joshua Stevens, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

One additional setting controlled how much energy a collision dissipated. Changing that setting had relatively little effect across much of the range tested, so the same basic setup could reproduce all three patterns without separate adjustments for each one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What changing ice conditions could mean<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

How tightly ice is packed and how large its pieces are influence the frequency of collisions. That gives scientists a physical connection between local ice conditions and the way floes disperse over wider areas, according to UCR\u2019s engineering college<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The distinction between drifting and spreading is useful here. A field of ice can travel in a general direction while individual pieces wander away from that shared path, and understanding that dispersal is central to this study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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