Climate

anomaly assessments are especially important in the context of the prospective activities of oil and gas companies on the Barents and Kara Sea shelves. No less important are the ice conditions along the Northern Sea Route. The warming of 2000–2012 has already led to the refusal of ice-breaker support from companies participating in Arctic shipping. The reverse trend may bring about unfavourable consequences for all kinds of economic activity in the Russian Arctic. The authors thank the two reviewers for their constructive comments. Additionally we thank Mr. Peter Senn for editing the English of the manuscript and his valuable comments. “
“An important aspect of the research problem of slicks on a sea surface is the study of their temporal dynamics. One of the significant parameters of surface films (SF) of different origin is their characteristic dimensions. Generally accepted theoretical selleck chemicals llc models discriminate the process of spot spreading into typical temporal spreading stages: one or another physical mechanism prevails at each stage. Fay (1969) identified three consecutive basic stages in the spread of an initially concentrated volume of selleck chemicals oil with constant properties,

notably, gravity-inertial (balance between gravitational force and inertial force), gravity-viscous (balance between gravitational force and frictional force), and the surface tension regime, when the surface tension force and frictional force are in balance. These three stages are all characterised by power laws governing the size of the slick as a function of time α tβ but with different coefficients α and β for each stage. Fay’s classification was a powerful incentive for the phased studying of these processes. A great many research

papers are dedicated to theoretical models and laboratory measurements of film spreading (e.g. Hoult, 1972, Foda 3-mercaptopyruvate sulfurtransferase and Cox, 1980, Camp and Berg, 1987, Dussaud and Troian, 1998, Svitova et al., 1999 and Boniewicz-Szmyt and Pogorzelski, 2008 and references therein). In particular, Hoult (1972) and Buckmaster (1973) give theoretical analyses for the spread of oil slicks on a quiescent body of water. The dependence of the film border on time, thickness and velocity distributions along a spreading film were analysed in detail by Foda & Cox (1980) and Phillips (1997) for both plane and axisymmetric slicks. Laboratory results of surface film dynamic of various pure oils and their liquid solutions (Camp & Berg 1987) are in good agreement with the model calculations presented by Foda & Cox (1980). Boniewicz-Szmyt & Pogorzelski (2008) used video-enhanced microscopy and dynamic tensiometry methods to study the spreading of different liquid hydrocarbons in laboratory conditions. According to the experimental observations of these authors, the lens expansion rates are one order of magnitude lower than those predicted by classical tension-gradient-driven spreading theory.