Frost Flower

Frost flowers are clusters of ice crystals that grow on new sea ice and nilas when the air is far colder than the surface, condensing from a supersaturated layer over the warm young ice. They wick up brine from the ice skin, reaching salinities above 100 practical salinity units, several times that of seawater. That brine load makes frost flowers a source of sea-salt aerosol and a site for bromine-release chemistry tied to polar tropospheric ozone depletion. For remote sensing they roughen the surface and raise the microwave and radar backscatter of otherwise smooth nilas, complicating thin-ice retrievals.