Intermittency of principal stress directions within Arctic sea ice

Jérôme Weiss (1)

1 LGGE - Laboratoire de glaciologie et géophysique de l'environnement

The brittle deformation of Arctic sea ice is not only characterized by strong spatial heterogeneity as well as intermittency of stress and strain-rate amplitudes, but also by an intermittency of principal stress directions, with power law statistics of angular fluctuations, long-range correlations in time, and multifractal scaling. This intermittency is much more pronounced than that of wind directions, i.e., is not a direct inheritance of the turbulent forcing.

Keywords: deformation; faulting; fluctuations; fractals; sea ice

Domains: Glaciology

Jérôme Weiss. Intermittency of principal stress directions within Arctic sea ice. Physical Review E : Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics, 2008, 77 (5), pp.056106. ⟨10.1103/PhysRevE.77.056106⟩. ⟨insu-00381128⟩