Ice-Albedo Feedback Lab

Two glaciers can feel the exact same air temperature and still melt at wildly different rates, because how fast ice melts depends on what it looks like, not just how warm the air is. This simulator lays out a grid of icy surface patches and lets sunlight act on each one individually: bright, fresh snow reflects most incoming energy away, while bare or soot-darkened ice absorbs several times more of the same sunlight. As patches melt through, they expose darker surfaces underneath, which absorb even more energy and melt faster still — the ice-albedo feedback loop that makes glacier melt seasons accelerate rather than proceed in a straight line. Tune solar intensity, starting snow cover and soot/dust deposition to see how quickly a bright field turns into a dark, fast-melting one.