How do oceanic currents influence the dynamics of ice floes?

Ice floes are floating sea ice pieces with a wide range of length-scales (m-km) and shapes. They play an important role in the global climate as they modulate the sunlight energy absorbed by the oceans. Understanding the dynamics of ice floes and their coupling to the atmospheric and oceanic flows is therefore an essential ingredient in the global climate forecast. Here, we use a table-top experimental setup to study the dynamics of arbitrary-shaped objects atop a forced quasi-2D flow. Our observations show that the main features controlling the dynamics of these objects are their size relative to the mean flow eddy size and their shape. We finally discuss the implications of our observations for the dynamics of ice floes.