Premelting and the Water Budget in Polycrystalline Ice

A number of mechanisms, generally classified as premelting are responsible for the presence of liquid water at ice interfaces at temperatures well below 0°C . Premelting includes the familiar colligative effects of ions and other impurities, which lower the chemical potential of the liquid solvent, and the Gibbs-Thomson effect which describes the lowering of the melting point for a solid convex into its melt. Such phenomena are known to influence the amount of water in natural and laboratory polycrystalline ice and to control the thermal, chemical, and material transport properties. Thus, liquid water within the solid ice matrix influences the behavior of terrestrial ice over a wide range of length and time scales, from the macroscopic behavior of temperate glacier ice to the distribution of climate proxies within polar ice sheets. Using optical microscopy observations of ice near its melting temperature, rough bounds have been put on the length scales and dihedral angle associated with the liquid network in ice. However, these techniques cannot resolve whether the boundary between any two grains is wet or dry. For this, a more refined light scattering method has been developed. This method and the results are described both in the context of the basic physics and the application to the geophysical setting. The importance of this approach is broad, with implications ranging from the understanding of the role of intermolecular forces in the wetting properties of the ice/ice interface to constructing a budget for the total amount of water in an ice sheet. Additionally, basic applications of grain boundary melting are important in fields from metallurgy and materials science to mineral physics and geoengineering.