Ice & Climate Physics

Arctic Ocean Dynamics: Geophysical Scale Sea Ice Rheology from Laboratory Experiments

The UK will be the largest population concentration to be affected by Arctic climate change in the coming decades and understanding the Arctic cryosphere is now a key objective in UK science. Our general aim is to improve the representation of sea ice dynamics in GCMs. We will do this by relating sea ice rheology on climatically important length scales to the material properties of sea ice as measured in the laboratory. But we will focus on sea ice friction.

Sea ice is notably brittle. Ice deformation in the Arctic Ocean, driven by wind shear, causes formation of thick ice through pressure ridging and thin ice through creation of open-water leads. To improve current models it is essential to incorporate brittle-discontinuous processes into rheological models. The aim of this research project is to establish a geophysical scale sea ice rheology from laboratory experiments.

In collaboration with Dr Danny Feltham of UCL CPOM we have been doing laboratory experiments in the Ice Physics Lab on ice friction and large scale ice floe friction simulations in the environmental ice basins at Helsinki University of Technology and the HSVA Hamburg Ship Testing Ice Basin. We have demonstrated that a new friction law is required for sea ice dynamics. The next step is to incorporate this into large scale models of sea ice dynamics.

Flow of the Antarctic Ice Sheet


We are studying the anistropic flow of the Antarctic ice sheet with the aim of improving models of ice sheet response to climate change. Steve Boon, Neil Hughes and Peter Sammonds have designed and built a new unique triaxial deformation and tomographic imaging cell for ice, funded by the Paul Instrument Fund. We are now testing EPICA ice from the European deep boreholes in Antarctica at Dome C and Dronning Maud Land. We are collaborating with the Alfred-Wegener Institut, Bremerhaven and the British Antarctic Survey in the EPICA programme.