What are some Earth surfaces that have high albedos and some that have low albedos?
1 Answer
Albedo refers to a material's ability to reflect sunlight. Examples are below.
Explanation:
Albedo is the measure of the reflectivity of a material. A high albedo means it reflects a lot of light and a low albedo means it absorbs a lot of light.
An example of a high albedo material is snow and ice. One of the reasons why snow and ice can hang around for a long time after they have fallen in winter is that they are white (and so absorb no or little sunlight) and have a reflective quality as well.
An example of a low albedo material is dirt. Dirt tends to be a dark colour (browns, reds, blacks, etc) and so absorb sunlight. They also are very non-reflective and so don't reflect light well.
The melting of glaciers (high albedo) gets accelerated when low albedo material is either exposed (such as dirt that the glacier has dug up and eroded away from the ground under it), or it gets accelerated with the growth of bacteria that live in water pools on the surface of "warm glaciers" - and the bacteria are red in colour so that acts to melt glaciers faster.
