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THAWING
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Warm weather following a freeze; snow and ice melt
Example:
they welcomed the spring thaw
Synonyms:
Classified under:
Nouns denoting natural phenomena
Hypernyms ("thawing" is a kind of...):
atmospheric condition; conditions; weather; weather condition (the atmospheric conditions that comprise the state of the atmosphere in terms of temperature and wind and clouds and precipitation)
Sense 2
Meaning:
The process whereby heat changes something from a solid to a liquid
Example:
the thawing of a frozen turkey takes several hours
Synonyms:
Classified under:
Nouns denoting natural processes
Hypernyms ("thawing" is a kind of...):
heating; warming (the process of becoming warmer; a rising temperature)
phase change; phase transition; physical change; state change (a change from one state (solid or liquid or gas) to another without a change in chemical composition)
Derivation:
thaw (become or cause to become soft or liquid)
II. (verb)
Sense 1
-ing form of the verb thaw
Context examples:
They found that high rates of carbon accumulation in lake sediments were stimulated by several factors, including thermokarst erosion and deposition of terrestrial organic matter, nutrient release from thawing permafrost that stimulated lake productivity, and by slow decomposition in cold, anoxic lake bottoms.
(Certain Arctic lakes store more greenhouse gases than they release, NSF)
Using published data from the circumpolar Arctic, their own new field observations of Siberian permafrost and thermokarsts, radiocarbon dating, atmospheric modeling and spatial analyses, the research team studied how thawing permafrost is affecting climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.
(Certain Arctic lakes store more greenhouse gases than they release, NSF)
