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 as a spatial cellular process: absorbed sunlight thins the snowpack to expose bare ice, meltwater pools into low-lying melt ponds that darken as they deepen, and the deepest ponds eventually erode through to open water. Each of those transitions lowers the surface's reflectivity, which raises the energy it absorbs, which accelerates every transition again — the ice-albedo feedback loop, driven here by real melt-pond depth-albedo physics rather than a single global temperature number. Tune the solar forcing, starting snow depth and meltwater drainage rate to see how fast — or how completely — a floe's albedo can collapse in one melt season.