"It will take a while to get there — ice sheets don't melt instantaneously — but that's what we will be doing.
The crystals melt instantaneously on heating and reveal a spread in the rates of melting of the radial {120} faces.
"It's like if you leave a big block of ice on the table, it doesn't melt instantaneously, there's always a delay in the system," said Kurt Lambeck, who led the research at ANU. "We know from the last interglacial period that when temperatures were several degrees warmer than today there was a lot more water in the oceans, with levels around 4 to 5m higher than today.
In fact any increase above the melting temperature on the nanoparticle surface is enough to almost instantaneously melt it.
The searing heat of the plasma would instantaneously melt any object it touches, cutting cleanly like a blade.
They are formed when rocks are instantaneously melted and splashed out of impact sites in the form of big gobbets of molten glass, then cooled while spinning through the air.
Melt is assumed to migrate with solid, and if the melt fraction exceeds 2 wt.%, the excess melt is assumed to be instantaneously extracted from the mantle (Iwamori and Zhao 2000; Nakajima et al. 2005; Zhu et al. 2013).
Finally, relaxation tests show that crystallite melting does not systematically occur instantaneously.
Water partitioning between solid and melt is assumed to reach equilibrium instantaneously, with a constant partition coefficient of 0.01 (Aubaud et al. 2008; Kohn and Grant 2006).
In the following, we assume that a rocky core, and a water mantle, form instantaneously after the complete melting of ice, because is much shorter than the thermal evolution time scale of the order of 1 Myr.
Hence, once the ice begins to melt, all the anhydrous minerals are converted to hydrous minerals instantaneously.
