ABSTRACT Damage features of the ice sheet have been achieving increasing attention due to its important engineering applications, but there still lacks related research concerning the ice damage characteristics under impacting load. In this paper, the JH-2 constitutive model is applied to describe the ice material properties. The numerical simulations of ice material suffering failure mode were conducted to validate the effectiveness of ice material. With the validated ice material model, studies are conducted to investigate the general damage features of ice sheets subjected to impacting load. The influence factors including head shapes of the impactor, water support and non-dimensional mass and length to ratios of impactor on ice damage are investigated. Moreover, the penetration load and combination of underwater explosion load acting on the ice sheet are discussed. The results show that the head shape of the impactor has a significant influence on ice damage characteristics during the whole ice-breaking process.