Melt Pond Evolution on Arctic Sea Ice

Arctic sea ice does not simply shrink at its edges — its surface albedo collapses first. This simulator models one floe's summer melt season cell by cell: absorbed sunlight melts the snowpack (latent heat of fusion), then the ice surface; meltwater pools into the low-lying parts of the ice and darkens them, and the deepest ponds eventually melt through to open water. Each transition lowers the surface's reflectivity, which raises the energy it absorbs, which speeds every transition again — the ice-albedo feedback loop, here with real latent-heat bookkeeping and a Blender-built camp scene around the live surface. Tune the peak sunshine, the snow depth and how leaky the ice is to see how fast — or whether — a floe's albedo collapses in one season.