Category: "Cryoconite"
Dark lines in melting snowpiles
March 30th, 2019Snow cleared from a city street slowly vanishes, leaving lines of "dirt".
(Click on images to view more closely.) Where the snow has a distinct edge, you can see the dark lines are ridges, some of which can be quite sharp:
Why is this?
Cryoconite ridging
This all happens because the snow is vanishing but the dirt is not. The vanishing is actually called "ablation", meaning some combination of melting, sublimating, and evaporating. It is mostly melting in the above case, but it is possible that evaporation helps to form the lines. About the dirt, it is not clear exactly what it is. The term "cryoconite" is used when similar dark dirt falls and clusters on glaciers and ice sheets, so to be specific, we might call it "cryoconite ridging".
