Identification

Title

Fracture criteria and tensile strength for natural glacier ice calibrated from remote sensing observations of Antarctic ice shelves

Abstract

The conditions under which ice fractures and calves icebergs from Antarctic ice shelves are poorly understood due largely to a lack of relevant observations. Though previous studies have estimated the stresses at which ice fractures in the laboratory and through sparse observations, there remains significant uncertainty in the applicability of these results to naturally deforming glacier ice on larger scales. Here, we aim to better constrain the stresses under which ice fractures using remote sensing data by identifying large-scale fractures on Antarctic ice shelves, calculating the principal stresses from the observed strain rates and comparing the stresses of unfractured and fractured areas. Using the inferred stresses, we evaluate five common fracture criteria: Mohr–Coulomb, von Mises, strain energy, Drucker–Prager and Hayhurst. We find the tensile strength of ice ranges from 202 to 263 $\mathrm{kPa}$ assuming the viscous stress exponent n = 3, narrowing the range produced by previous observational studies. For n = 4, we find tensile strengths of 423–565 $\mathrm{kPa}$ , bringing our inferences closer to alignment with laboratory experiments. Importantly, we show that crevassed and uncrevassed areas in the four largest ice shelves are distinct in principal stress space, suggesting our results apply to all ice shelves and the broader ice sheet.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7pz5f8v

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

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keyword value

Text

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title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

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East bounding longitude

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Temporal extent

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Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2025-01-21T00:00:00Z

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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:10pt;font-style:normal;" data-sheets-root="1">Copyright author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.</span>

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact