Flow laws for ice constrained by 70 years of laboratory experiments.

ABSTRACT: Flow laws for ice predict rates of deformation (strain) and are fundamental to modelling glacier and ice-sheet dynamics. Here we apply Bayesian inference to laboratory measurements accumulated over 70 years to constrain flow laws for ice-sheet modelling. At low strains, commonly used flow laws-derived from individual experimental datasets with narrow stress, temperature and grain-size ranges-fail to capture the full complexity of ice behaviour. We show that a multicomponent flow law that sums strain rates from different deformation mechanisms is needed to capture grain-size and temperature sensitivities observed in the full set of experiments. This multicomponent flow law is applicable to natural scenarios where the anisotropy of ice is weak or where the deformation kinematics differ from

SUBMITTER: Fan S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11981940 | biostudies-literature | 2025

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature