Modelling the Flow of Glaciers and Ice Sheets

Abstract

Kolumban Hutter burst in to the field of (land ice) glaciology in 1978 when he presented a paper at a conference in Ottawa [the proceedings appeared as J. Glaciol. 24 (90)]. This early work concerned scaling effects and perturbation methods in glacier flow. Hutter (1981) introduces a version of what is now known as the ‘shallow ice approximation’, though his application is to nearly-parallel ice slabs and the corrective effect of longitudinal stress on the shear stress, rather than to the general motion of glaciers [Hutter et al. (1981) deal with a similar problem, but without the use of stretched coordinates]. The latter subject was the focus of Fowler and Larson’s (1978) model. The other mathematician who became involved with the development of mathematical models was Leslie Morland, whose early papers on the subject (Morland and Johnson, 1980, 1982) were concerned more with ice sheets than with glaciers. All of these early papers developed dimensionless models and used the language and methods of perturbation theory, and this introduced novelty to the glaciological literature, but there were differences of style and detail in approach, and these emerged more clearly in later work on thermomechanical models (discussed below).