Spiky ice and penitente tilting

Abstract

Indexación: Scopus.Under certain conditions, at high altitude, the surface of snow develops spike-like structures known as penitentes. This is a rather counterintuitive phenomenon, which is a consequence of surface sublimation at a given point as a result of the incidence of light scattered by the surrounding region. Following the existing literature, we model the time evolution of the phenomenon described above as a 1D diffusion equation with a non-local source term, as it represents the light coming from all the line of sight defined for a point of the curve. For small initial perturbations in the surface, the system undergoes a thermodynamic instability which triggers the formation of spikes. For sunlight coming in at a given angle, numerical simulations account for a feature observed in the real system: penitentes get tilted in the direction of the sunlight. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.We thank R. Rojas and R. Soto for interesting discussions. P.G. was financially supported by Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, UNAB, to attend SOCHIFI 2016 Meeting.https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/1043/1/01200