WHAT CAN BE NEGLECTED
Of course ice has some tensile strength; the question is whether that
is important in a given circumstance.
Consider the question of liquid water surface tension. It's a crucial
term in cloud microphysics. Cloud microphysics is important to
weather, and weather is important to ocean circulation, yet no
oceanographer (actually I know of a marginal exception, someone
looking at air entrainment into the ocean in surf, but his career is
in trouble because it has turned out that the problem he is pursuing
is unimportant) spends any attention on surface tension. It negligible
on the scales of interest.
It seems to turn out to be negligible in sea ice distribution
calculations. I have not seen this worked out, but likely it has been
done often enough. If William says the term is negligible then I
believe him. That certainly agrees with my qualitative understanding.
The present question seems to be whether the possibly unprecedented
opening near the Ellesmere or North Greenland Coast has large scale
geophysical implications. If that is the question your intuition
counts for less than the intuition of people working in the field.
BURDEN OF PROOF
It is not inconceivable that the conventional wisdom, here represented
by WIlliam with me as cheerleader, is wrong.
The same applies elsewhere in climate. Science cannot pursue every lay
person's intuitions, even every informed lay person's opinions, a
resource that our field is unusually blessed with in proportion to the
actual population of professional workers.
That's why burden of proof is on you to come up with a model (not
necessarily a computation, but necessarily something resembling a
testable hypothesis) where this matters.
Now, getting that noticed if you have such a model originating outside
the recognized research centers is another matter, and maybe science
is due for some criticism on that score.
As far as I know you and Fergus just have hunches, though.
IMPLICATIONS ON SMALLER SCALES
If there are smaller scale implications at the site is another
question. Maybe so.
I doubt if anyone has paid enough attention to those sites to have any
strong opinion. It is interesting. I wonder if there is any precedent,
and if not, what is actually going on up there.
Interestingly, it will be impossible to fund and mount a mission in
time to do an in situ check. Perhaps some fabulously wealthy cowboy
will do us the favor of getting some cameras and instruments to the
site and simultaneously loosening the institutional monopolies.
SCALING REVISITED
All of this reminds me how scaling and regimes are not generally
understood. It's a part of basic undergraduate mathematics to
meteorologists and oceanographers, and to a lesser extent to fluids
folk in general, but it isn't really part of even the mathematically
literate lexicon in general. We are so steeped in it that we forget
how alien it is to others. I heard nothing like it in engineering
school. Though in retrospect it is implicit everywhere in engineering,
as far as I know it is nowhere explicit.
Since this is fundamental to my critique of economics, it's a first
order important culture gap in my peculiar worldview. In short, I
suspect that the approximations on which conventional economics is
based are inappropriate on longer time scales. I have never seen
economics explicitly apply conventional scaling arguments either.
However, engineers have the advantage of real world tests. Either the
bridge stands up, or it falls down.
mt
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