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Suncup (snow)

Bowl-shaped open depressions into a snow surface

Suncup (snow)
Summary

Bowl-shaped open depressions into a snow surface

Suncups on a snow patch near Gibby Beam, UK.

Suncups are bowl-shaped open depressions into a snow surface, normally wider than they are deep. They form closely packed, honeycomb, often hexagonal patterns with sharp narrow ridges separating smoothly concave hollows. For a given set of suncups, the hollows are normally all around the same size, meaning that the pattern is quasi-periodic on 20–80 cm scales. The depressions are typically 2–50 cm deep.

Suncups form during the ablation (melting away) of snowy surfaces. It is thought they can form in a number of different ways. These include melting of clean snow by incident solar radiation in bright sunny conditions,

References

References

  1. (1971). "Glacier ice". University of Washington Press.
  2. (2003). "Morphogenesis of typical winter and summer snow surface patterns in a continental alpine environment". Wiley.
  3. (1987). "Mode of Formation of "Ablation Hollows" Controlled by Dirt Content of Snow". Cambridge University Press (CUP).
  4. Betterton, M. D.. (2001-04-26). "Theory of structure formation in snowfields motivated by penitentes, suncups, and dirt cones". American Physical Society (APS).
Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

glaciology snow-or-ice-weather-phenomena
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