Sea Ice Deformation Is Not Scale Invariant Over Length Scales Greater Than a Kilometer

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Abstract In March and April 2021, buoys were deployed in the Beaufort Sea, Arctic Ocean, to measure sea‐ice horizontal deformation over spatial scales that had not been previously achieved. Geodetic‐quality position measurements allowed measurements of strain‐rate over lengths from about 200 m to 2 km. Conventional ice‐drifters extended spatial coverage up to about 100 km. Past studies find there is multi‐fractal behavior for horizontal sea‐ice deformation from 10 to 1,000 km. Our results demonstrate that such behavior does not hold when including spatial scales below 10 km. We find that sea‐ice deformation is not scale invariant between the scale of individual sea‐ice floes and aggregates of floes. Therefore, we cannot expect the same physical laws or forcing to describe sea‐ice kinematics over these regimes, nor can we assume log‐log linear behavior for mean deformation. Using this scaling behavior as a metric to validate models that resolve sea ice floes and their interactions is hence not recommended.

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