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Wednesday, July 10, 2019

“Just Have A Think”: Arctic Sea Ice Loss & Enthalpy

YouTube channel, “Just Have A Think”, has 63 episodes to date and deals with subjects related to climate change. It’s presented in actual factual calm manner without hyperbole. 

One significant episode relates to a topic that I was totally ignorant of, namely, “latent heat of fusion” (enthalpy, latent heat). This video does an excellent job of explaining it and how it relates to sea ice and climate change.

Re: Arctic Sea Ice Loss (16 minutes)
Note: If you can’t watch the whole thing, then at least watch the first two minutes):
https://youtu.be/YYJIwGACKY8
And if you liked that, then follow up with—
Blue Ocean Event:
https://youtu.be/qo3cznpfIpA

If I understand correctly, the amount of heat energy that is needed to melt ice in contact with water (sea ice) is the same amount of heat energy that would be required to raise that newly melted ‘0 degree Celsius water’ to ‘79 degrees Celsius’ (scalding hot water). Thus, when sea ice is no longer acting as a heat sink, the ocean water takes on the full thermal warming of the sun (plus, the reflectivity of the ice is gone).

Here’s some sites I visited to help understand it better:

Heat of fusion — example problem — melting of ice:
https://www.thoughtco.com/heat-of-fusion-melting-ice-problem-609498

Enthalpy:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy

How to measure heat of fusion of ice:
https://sciencing.com/measure-heat-fusion-ice-8097648.html

Latent heat:
https://www.britannica.com/science/latent-heat