Drift of elastic floating ice sheets by waves and current: Multiple sheets

Finger rafting: a generic instability of floating elastic sheets.

Colliding ice floes are often observed to form a series of interlocking fingers. We show that this striking phenomenon is not a result of some peculiar property of ice but rather a general and robust mechanical phenomenon reproducible in the laboratory with other floating materials. We determine the theoretical relationship between the width of the resulting fingers and the material's mechanica...

Ice sheets and nitrogen.

Snow and ice play their most important role in the nitrogen cycle as a barrier to land-atmosphere and ocean-atmosphere exchanges that would otherwise occur. The inventory of nitrogen compounds in the polar ice sheets is approximately 260 Tg N, dominated by nitrate in the much larger Antarctic ice sheet. Ice cores help to inform us about the natural variability of the nitrogen cycle at global an...

Vanishing Polar Ice Sheets

Global temperatures have increased by 0.8◦C since instrumental records began, and the last decade has been the warmest. This warming has been closely linked to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations due to human activities. Arctic warming is leading to thinning and disappearance of sea ice on the Arctic Ocean and the increased melting of the Greenland ice sheet. In the last decade the Antarct...

Ice sheets and sea level.

Reshaping nemato-elastic sheets.

We consider three-dimensional reshaping of thin nemato-elastic sheets containing half-charged defects upon nematic-isotropic transition. Gaussian curvature, that can be evaluated analytically when the nematic texture is known, differs from zero in the entire domain and has a dipole or hexapole singularity, respectively, at defects of positive or negative sign. The latter kind of defects appears...