2018/10/04 by Etienne Jambon-Puillet, Noushine Shahidzadeh, Daniel Bonn · 1 voice · 1 citation
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Engineering · Environmental Science · #nanoparticles nucleation surface interactions #Nanomaterials and Printing Technologies #Atmospheric aerosols and clouds
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41467-018-06689-x
openalex publication_date 2018/10/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
The evaporation (sublimation) of ice and snow has a major impact on global climate, since the amount of ice and snow determines Earth's albedo. Yet, due to their complex geometry with several sharp regions which are singular for the evaporation, the precise evaporation dynamics of snow and ice crystals remains challenging to predict. Here, we study the sublimation of snowflakes and pointy ice drops. We show that the evaporation rates of water and ice drops are similar; they are both limited by the diffusive transport of the vapour. This allows us to predict ice and snowflake evaporation quantitatively by solving the diffusive free-boundary problem, which correctly predicts the rapid self-similar evolution of sharp edges and points. Beyond providing a conceptual picture to understand the sublimation of ice crystals, our results are more generally applicable to other diffusion problems such as the dissolution of salt crystals or pharmaceuticals.