Abstract
The fluid permeability of sea ice governs a broad range of physical and biological processes in the polar marine environment, such as melt pond evolution, snow-ice formation, and nutrient replenishment for sea ice algae. Columnar sea ice is effectively impermeable to bulk flow for brine volume fractions below about 5%, while above this threshold fluid can flow vertically through the ice. Granular sea ice has different crystallographic and brine microstructures. It has long formed a significant portion of the Antarctic sea ice cover, and has become increasingly prevalent in the rapidly changing Arctic. Data gathered off the coast of East Antarctica indicate that this threshold for bulk vertical flow through granular sea ice there is around 10%. While columnar and granular microstructures display quite different threshold values, percolation theory predicts that they have the same universal critical exponent for the permeability as a function of porosity above the threshold, which agrees closely with our data. These findings impact physical and ecological modeling efforts, and must be taken into account when granular ice is present.
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Data availability
The datasets analyzed during the current study are available from the Australian Antarctic Data Centre in the SIPEX II repository at https://data.aad.gov.au/metadata/SIPEX_II.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the crew of the Aurora Australis and participants of SIPEX I and SIPEX II for their help in obtaining the data presented here. In particular, we thank Ian Allison and Tony Worby for their leadership of SIPEX I and SIPEX II, respectively. We also thank the University of Tasmania, the Australian Antarctic Division, and the ACE Cooperative Research Centre for their support. Finally, we are most grateful to David Lubbers for his immeasurable contributions to this work and to the success of the expeditions in which he participated.
Funding
We gratefully acknowledge support from the Division of Mathematical Sciences and Arctic Natural Sciences at the US National Science Foundation (NSF) through grants DMS-0940249, ARC-0934721, DMS-1413454, DMS-2136198, and DMS-2206171. We are also grateful for support from the Applied and Computational Analysis Program and the Arctic and Global Prediction Program at the US Office of Naval Research through grants N00014-13-1-0291, N00014-18-1-2552, N00014-18-1-2041, N00014-21-1-2909 and N00014-26-1-2114. J. L. Tison acknowledges the support of the Belgian Science Policy (contract SD/CA/03A) and of the Belgian FRS-FNRS (Fons National de la Recherche Scientifique - FRFC contract no. 2.4649.07).
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KMG, CMF, AG, JL, and CS conceived and designed the experiments. KMG, AG, CS, and JLT performed the experiments. All authors analyzed the data. KMG, CMF, AG, JL, CS, and JLT contributed materials and analysis tools. KMG, AG, DQM, and CS wrote the main manuscript text. All authors reviewed the manuscript.
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Golden, K.M., Furse, C.M., Gully, A. et al. Percolation threshold for vertical fluid flow through granular sea ice. Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-41706-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-41706-w
