# NEW PAPER OUT ON SEA ICE RIDGING 

Considerable areas of the polar oceans are covered by sea ice,
formed by frozen sea water.  The extent and thickness of the ice
pack influences local and regional ecology and climate.  The ice
thickness is particularly important for the ice-cover survival
during warm summers.  Wind and ocean currents compress and shear
the sea ice, and can break and stack ice into ridges.  Current sea
ice models assume that the ice becomes increasingly rigid as ridges
of ice rubble grow.  Modeling sea ice as bonded particles, we show
that ice becomes significantly weaker right after the onset of ridge
building.  We introduce a mathematical framework that allows these
physical processes to be included in large-scale models.

Today a [1]new paper of mine is published in the AGU-group journal
[2]Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, and it is written
with co-authors [3]Olga Sergienko and [4]Alistair Adcroft at Princeton
University (New Jersey, USA).  I use my program [5]Granular.jl for
the simulations.


## Abstract

The Effects of Ice Floe-Floe Interactions on Pressure Ridging in Sea Ice

The mechanical interactions between ice floes in the polar sea-ice
packs play an important role in the state and predictability of the
sea-ice cover. We use a Lagrangian-based numerical model to investigate
such floe-floe interactions. Our simulations show that elastic and
reversible deformation offers significant resistance to compression
before ice floes yield with brittle failure. Compressional strength
dramatically decreases once pressure ridges start to form, which
implies that thicker sea ice is not necessarily stronger than thinner
ice. The mechanical transition is not accounted for in most current
sea-ice models that describe ice strength by thickness alone. We
propose a parameterization that describes failure mechanics from
fracture toughness and Coulomb sliding, improving the representation
of ridge building dynamics in particle-based and continuum sea-ice
models.


References:

[1] https://doi.org/10.1029/2020MS002336
[2] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/19422466
[3] https://scholar.princeton.edu/aos_sergienko/home
[4] https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/alistair-adcroft-homepage/
[5] https://src.adamsgaard.dk/seaice-experiments