LONDON: What piques a penguin’s curiosity? For a few curious birds, it’s been mathematician Ken Golden drilling cores from Antarctic sea ice. Golden has been on 17 expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic over the course of his career, teasing out the ice’s unique structures. Understanding the structure of sea ice can reveal not only how fast sea ice will melt and the climate impact from shrinking polar ice caps , but also provide clues for better understanding composite materials — such as human bone, or polycrystalline media like rocks and metals — based on how ice crystals and brine intertwine in the microstructure of sea ice.
“Sea ice is a very complicated system,” said Golden, who has been studying it firsthand since his first expedition to Antarctica, in 1980. “When you go down there,” he said, “you see how it interacts with the ocean, how it interacts with the waves, with the atmosphere.”
