Sunlight & Arctic Sea Ice with Dr. Bonnie Light

In this specific lesson, Dr. Bonnie Light adds new meaning to her name! You'll learn about sunlight's vital role in the Arctic system — specifically, how it affects melting in the summer and how different albedos play into this.

This video is part of a collection called “Frozen in the Ice: Exploring the Arctic,” offered through the online course platform Coursera, about the extraordinary MOSAiC Arctic research mission that has frozen an icebreaker into the Arctic Ocean, where it will drift for 13 months (mosaic-expedition.org).

April 1, 2020

Video Theme

Science Content Video 

Audience

Educators

K-12 Students

College Students

Lifelong Learners

Program Reference

Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC)

About the Presenter Header

About the Presenter

Dr. Bonnie Light's principal research interest is the study of how solar radiation interacts with Earth’s cryosphere. In particular, her focus is on understanding relationships between the physical and optical properties of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. The relative amounts of sunlight incident on sea ice that are backscattered to the atmosphere, absorbed by the ice, and transmitted to the ocean depend strongly on the physical properties of the ice. This partitioning of energy in turn controls a significant part of the heat budget of the polar oceans and may influence how sea ice drives and responds to changes in climate.

Additional Resources

Visit this page to access the “Frozen in the Ice: Exploring the Arctic” Coursera.

In this course, you’ll hear directly from more than three dozen MOSAiC scientists and Arctic experts as they summarize the core of their research, what types of data they collect during MOSAiC on the ice, under the sea, and in the air and describe why this expedition is so key for increasing our understanding of the Arctic and global climate systems.