The Tricky Energy Budget of Freezing Soil: A Thermodynamic Framework for Understanding Phase Changes
About Hydrology (noreply@blogger.com)
Freezing soil presents unique challenges in understanding the coupled mass and energy dynamics within the Earth’s critical zone. This paper presents a comprehensive thermodynamic framework for analyzing phase transitions in soil-water-ice systems. We present a unified treatment based on non-equilibrium thermodynamics, where temperature, pressure, and chemical potential act as primary driving forces. The framework accounts for freezing point depression through mechanisms including the Gibbs-Thoms