Abstract
Abstract. The ongoing disintegration of large ice shelf parts in Antarctica raise the need for a better understanding of the physical processes that trigger critical crack growth in ice shelves. Finite elements in combination with configurational forces facilitate the analysis of single surface fractures in ice under various boundary conditions and material parameters. The principles of linear elastic fracture mechanics are applied to show the strong influence of different depth dependent functions for the density and the Young's modulus on the stress intensity factor KI at the crack tip. Ice, for this purpose, is treated as an elastically compressible solid and the consequences of this choice in comparison to the predominant incompressible approaches are discussed. The computed stress intensity factors KI for dry and water filled cracks are compared to critical values KIc from measurements that can be found in literature.
Highlights
Eight of twelve ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula have retreated or disintegrated in the past decades (Cook and Vaughan, 2010; Braun et al, 2009)
Our analysis of cracks, based on well established fracture mechanical concepts, is focused on simplified scenarios which we derived from the break-up events that happened at the Wilkins Ice Shelf in 2008/2009 (Braun et al, 2009)
Fracture mechanical concepts investigate the criticality of cracks by determining the stress intensity factor KI at the crack tip and comparing it with critical values KIc, obtained by experiments
Summary
Eight of twelve ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula have retreated or disintegrated in the past decades (Cook and Vaughan, 2010; Braun et al, 2009). Smith (1976) was the first who applied methods of linear elastic fracture mechanics for the evaluation of stress intensity factors of dry and water filled surface cracks in ice shelves. He simplified the crack geometry and boundary conditions (BCs) to facilitate the use of tabulated values gained from semianalytical methods by Tada et al (1973) and Sih (1973). The advantage of the FE method in comparison to semi-analytical methods or other numerical methods like finite differences lies primarily in its flexibility and in its selectable accuracy via mesh refinement
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