Summary
Sea ice can be interspersed vertically with both permeable and impermeable layers. These features can be smaller than a few centimetres but are important for understanding biogeochemical cycles in sea ice. Traditionally, sea-ice samples are collected by drilling into the ice with a rotating core barrel with a cutting head. Ice cores are extracted and then cut into sections that are melted to collect the variable of interest. Drawbacks to this method include difficulty cutting sections smaller than a few centimetres thick and contamination of samples. Brines may also drain from their in-situ locations and be lost, meaning that important micro-environments in sea ice may be overlooked or misrepresented. To address these drawbacks, we developed a sea-ice melt probe that bores into sea ice and collects high-resolution samples. The capability of the melt probe to delineate a layer of dye in artificial sea ice was tested during cold laboratory-based experiments. Complementary field experiments were carried out in first-year landfast sea ice during February–March 2023 at Saroma-ko Lagoon, Japan. Experiments consisted of testing the high-vertical-resolution capability of the melt probe as well as its ability to be deployed on snow-covered sea ice. The melt probe was able to delineate a layer of dye at a finer resolution (20 mm) than traditional ice coring (approximately 50–100 mm) and could sample sea-ice brine in the field at a high vertical resolution. Melt-probe samples were also used to measure iron in sea ice without contamination. This proof-of-concept study provides an alternative method of sampling sea ice with the ability to support new research on fine-scale structures, with applications for sampling dissolved and particulate sea-ice constituents including trace metals, macro-nutrients, microplastics and gases.