Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[Zeev Hed]

Think about it again, consider first a shallow sweet water lake, then move from there to the shore of an ocean (on the shore, the freezing line is often more than a foot deep), and then visualize a front of ice moving deeper every winter in the ocean. Because the part that is ice reflects the sun, warming is of the water body is reduced every year, after millions of years permanent ice caps slowly extends south (less of the sun energy is absorbed by water, more is reflected out). I think that you will see the evolution of ice oceans in conjunction with the development of extremely salty adjacent bodies of water oceans (slow ice buildup exclude salt from the ice and thus increase salt concentration in the remaining water), if water did not possess that anomaly. By the way, the role of ice and the inversion is much greater, the whole process of rock degradation into fertile lands is greatly assisted by the cracking of rocks when water get trapped in fissures and then expands upon freezing.

By thinking of a piece of ice sinking into a large body of water, you are robbing yoursel of the real picture, ice evolves as a front of freezing between an ice front (often land based) and a body of water, at least in the simplified and most common form. On small chunk of ice floating on the ocean, a slightly different process takes place, causing the ice to conatin more salt, but not enough to make it sink in the sea water which contains even higher concentration of salt.

Zeev