Open water should also be warmer than ice-covered ocean, because it absorbs more than 80 percent of sunlight that hits it, while ice reflects about 80 percent.
Lake Vostok contains an environment sealed off below the ice for millions of years, in conditions which could resemble those of the hypothesized ice-covered ocean of Jupiter's moon Europa.
The international Arctic expedition is considered the most ambitious program ever to fathom the secrets of that ice-covered ocean, the sea floor beneath it and the weather above it.
The start of snowball Earths are always marked by a sharp downturn in the δC value of sediments, a hallmark that may be attributed to a crash in biological productivity as a result of the cold temperatures and ice-covered oceans.
Unlike polynyas, which tend to occur, and remain, at a given location, leads are transient features that can form anywhere in an ice-covered ocean.
The Arctic region consists of a vast, ice-covered ocean, surrounded by treeless permafrost.
That started them talking about her studies of the ice-covered ocean on Europa.
Future targets for exploration in the Jovian system include the possible ice-covered liquid ocean on the moon Europa.
Heat is lost from the liquid water surface about a hundred times faster than from the ice surface, so less heat is lost overall from an ice-covered ocean.
The ice-covered ocean surrounding Antarctica was first penetrated by Captain James Cook, RN, in his exploratory voyages of 1773 and 1774 (Cook, 1961).