Abstract
The description of the ice flow in marine ice sheets is one of the problems that has attracted more attention in the Scientific community interested in the motion of glaciers. It is widely assumed that the stability of the marine ice sheets, as in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), where ice shelves are formed, is mainly controlled by the dynamics of the grounding line. The grounding line is the line where transition between ice attached to the solid ground and ice floating over the sea takes place. In this paper, we present the analysis of a mathematical model describing the behavior of the ice flow in the neighborhood of the grounding line, when considering the ice to be a fluid with shear-dependent viscosity of power-law type, including, as a particular case, the Newtonian one. We prove the existence of solutions representing the transition from ice sheet to ice shelf and with finite viscous dissipation near the grounding line. The interface between the ice shelf and sea water is proved to be locally flat near the grounding line.
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© 2008 Birkhäuser Verlag, Basel
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Fontelos, M.A., Muñoz, A.I. (2008). A Mathematical Study of the Ice Flow Behavior in a Neighborhood of the Grounding Line. In: Camacho, A.G., Díaz, J.I., Fernändez, J. (eds) Earth Sciences and Mathematics. Pageoph Topical Volumes. Birkhäuser Basel. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7643-9964-1_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7643-9964-1_8
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