Abstract
Sea ice floes in the Arctic collide with each other, and this leads to the production of smaller pieces of broken ice, which we call rubble. Rubble is also produced when ice collides with offshore structures, and when ships pass through sea ice. Previous analyses of ice friction have considered the contact between two sliding ice surfaces. Here, we consider the effective friction between two ice surfaces separated by ice rubble. In particular, we present experimental results across a range of scales and environments. We show results from metre-scale experiments in the Barents Sea; from metre-scale experiments in the Hamburg Ship Model Basin (HSVA); and from centimetre-scale experiments in the Ice Physics laboratory at UCL. We show that the effective kinetic friction is consistent across these scales, and comparable to friction coefficients measured without rubble. Looking at static friction, we find that when floes are in static contact for a short time, the presence of rubble acts to reduce static friction. However, if floes and rubble remain in static contact for around 104 s (a few hours) then the presence of rubble promotes strengthening, and the floe-floe effective friction can be raised by the presence of rubble. This has implications for modelling Arctic Ocean dynamics and for assessing friction loads on ships making repeated passages through a channel.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Aleksey Marchenko and the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS) for the opportunity to join the Lance RV cruise, and for guidance and the substantial logistical support during fieldwork in Svea. We also acknowledge and thank the Research Council of Norway for funding field work through the SFI SAMCoT. We would like to thank Mark Shortt, Aleksey Marchenko, Ellie Bailey and Sammie Buzzard for assistance with the experiments at HSVA and Neil Hughes, Steve Boon and John Bowles for assistance with laboratory experiments at UCL. We would like to thank Kaj Riska (TOTAL SA) for advice and continual support.
The work described in this publication was supported by the European Community's Horizon2020 Research and Innovation Programme through the grant to HYDRALA-PLUS, Contract no. 654110. The authors would like to thank the Hamburg Ship Model Basin (HSVA), especially the ice basin crew, for the hospitality, technical and scientific support and the professional execution of the test programme in the Research Infrastructure ARCTECLAB.
SS was supported by a UCL Impact Studentship funded by the Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction and TOTAL S.A.
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Scourfield, S., Lishman, B., Sammonds, P. (2022). The Influence of Ice Rubble on Sea Ice Friction: Experimental Evidence on the Centimetre and Metre Scales. In: Tuhkuri, J., Polojärvi, A. (eds) IUTAM Symposium on Physics and Mechanics of Sea Ice. IUTAM Bookseries, vol 39. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80439-8_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80439-8_4
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