The technology of freezing saline water irrigation (FSWI) with plastic mulching has been regarded as an effective way to reclaim the highly saline soil in coastal plains, which enabled the growth of crops in heavy saline soil that was not suitable for any crop growth before. However, after long-term treatment with FSWI, the microenvironment of the soil has been found to be affected by the growt...

This paper presents a combined experimental-modeling effort to interpret the coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical behaviors of freezing soil, where an unconfined, fully saturated clay is frozen due temperature gradient. By leveraging rich experimental data from microCT images and measurements taken during process, we examine not only how growth ice induces volumetric changes soil in specimen but als...

Frozen soil increases overland flow and flood risk, but the question remains under which conditions frozen significantly impedes infiltration. In this study, we simulated infiltration into with a numerical model to investigate theoretical controls on for several types. We found that capacities of soils intermediate texture are most affected by freezing. Furthermore, examined influence initial s...

An extensive ice body is buried under less than 20 cm to several meters of debris in Beacon Valley (Dry Valleys, Antarctica). The thermal behavior of the upper 20 m of permafrost, including the annually freezing and thawing surface (active layer) in this region of low relative humidity and very low annual precipitation, has great scientific interest. Distinctly different behavior from wet, arct...

Although efforts have been made to sample microorganisms from polar regions and to investigate a few of the properties that facilitate survival at freezing or subzero temperatures, soil communities that overwinter in areas exposed to alternate freezing and thawing caused by Foehn or Chinook winds have been largely overlooked. We designed and constructed a cryocycler to automatically subject soi...

Permanent grass vegetation on sloping soils is an option to protect fields from erosion, but decaying grass may liberate considerable amounts of dissolved reactive P (DRP) in springtime runoff. We studied the effects of freezing and thawing of grassed soil on surface runoff P concentrations by indoor rainfall simulations and tested whether the peak P concentrations could be reduced by amending ...

We investigated the hibernation ecology and cold hardiness of hatchling diamondback terrapins, Malaclemys terrapin (Schoepf, 1793), an estuarine species that reaches 42°N along the Atlantic Ocean. During 3 years of study, about 50% of the nests we monitored harboured hatchlings during winter, and the majority (87%) of these individuals survived despite being intermittently exposed to subfreezin...