Hot, Warm, & Cold Thermal Facts: Tidewater-Glaciers - 8

Fig. 1 Thwaites Glacier Dynamics

I. Warm as Ice

The laws of thermodynamics inform us that hot flows to cold (Thermodynamics).

In the deep ocean where it is dark, this flow includes radiation in the form of infrared spectrum photons which radiate out of cold seawater molecules into colder glacier ice molecules (The Ghost Photons - 2).

If the 2nd law of thermodynamics that tells us "hot flows to cold" was wrong, as deniers are tempted to say, the photo at Fig. 2 would be a trick of your lying eyes.

The river of melt water on the surface of the Antarctic glacier shown at Fig. 2  would become frozen as the vast coldness underneath it spontaneously flowed into it.

 

Fig. 2  Thwaites Glacier (~160 km,~100 mi wide)

Instead, the river water actually cuts into the ice of the glacier and the river gets deeper and/or wider as long as more ice melt water from upstream enters the river to perpetuate the flow.

Essentially, the melt water river is composed of ice warmed into water by photons of "heat" from the sun entering the glacial ice molecules ("Close to half of total solar radiation received at the surface of Earth is infrared").

That is, the river of melt water has "heat" in it which came from sunlight, and that "heat" continues to flow into the glacial ice, now indirectly from cold water rather than directly from sunlight.

The photon radiation from the melt water also weakens and melts the glacier ice (some of the river's "heat" flows into the ice under and beside it).

Fig. 3 Hadopelagic (all WOD Zones)

If the melt water flow were to stop or slow down, the "heat" in the water would flow out into the ice, so eventually the once flowing water would once again become ice and disappear (because no new melt water would be replenishing it) until another warm day came along.

We tend to say that the river is composed of "warm" melt water, but that inclination would become a popped bubble if we swam in that "warm melt water."

If we stayed in it even a relatively short while we could die from hypothermia (Hypothermia Table).

Even though melt water and ocean water making contact with the glaciers of Antarctica could kill us by hypothermia, there are a sufficient number of infrared wavelength photons to radiate "heat" (infrared photons) into the glacial ice and convert the ice into water (The Ghost Photons).

II. Graph

The graph at Fig. 3 is constructed from all in situ measurements in the World Ocean Database, SOCCOM datasets, NASA OMG datasets, and Woods Hole Institute datasets that record the temperature, salinity, and depth in the oceans.

The photon wavelength value I use in computations (e.g. Fig. 3) is 1300 nm (1.3 x 10^-6 m) which is low energy infrared photons (they can be as high as x 10^-4).

The exception is where the Potential Enthalpy (h^O) value is zero or less than zero, which means situations where there are no photons of infrared photons ("heat") in the seawater molecules (those in situ measurements are not used in this specialized case).

The graph is of the deepest ocean depths (Hadopelagic).

The upper-left pane is Conservative Temperature, the upper-right pane is Potential Enthalpy ("ocean heat content"), the lower-left pane is the amount of seawater in kilograms (kg) required to have enough IR photons to melt a kg of glacier ice, and the lower right pane is the number of moles of IR photon energy (in Joules) in the molecules of a kg of seawater.

Notice that the patterns in all but the lower-left pane match (thermodynamic proportion), and that the pattern of the lower-left pane is the opposite pattern, but still in proportion (kg of water decreases as the other three increase, and vice versa).

The point being made is that the ocean heat content (OHC) and flux depends on the amount of photons in ocean water molecules (everywhere and at all depths).

III. Closing Comments

This is part of my criticism of the half-truth used for the foundation of the "thermal expansion is the main or a main cause of sea level rise", which said half-truth is that when heat is added to water it always expands (see On Thermal Expansion & Thermal Contraction - 41).

The ghost water, ghost plumes, and ghost photons supply all the melt water necessary to replace the imaginary expansion which that erroneous thermal expansion hypothesis sets forth.

Thermal expansion and contraction induced sea level change is a minor part of the sea level change reality.

The previous post in this series is here.