Speaker
Description
Ice cores provide amazingly detailed and direct view into the interior of our Earth’s ice
sheets. This complements indirect ice dynamics’ observations on and from the surface.
Depending on their specific drilling location within the large-scale dynamics ice core
samples provide unique insight into the state of the material under natural conditions.
Material state properties (grain sizes, crystal orientations etc.) in concert with
parameters stemming from the dominating deformation processes define the
rheological response of the ice deformation, as one component of ice flow. Principals
and theory on these processes can explain the needed parametrization in flow laws.
Advances in measurement and data processing methodologies on all scales in the last
decade allow meaning full combination of the detailed knowledge from the microscale
to large-scale observations. Particularly flow and deformation structures from targeted
drillings aimed predominantly at understanding ice dynamics and from their larger
setting around the drill site provide partly surprising insight. Understanding some of
these structures now increases our understanding e.g. of the North East Greenland
Ice Stream with EastGRIP being the first “ice dynamics core”. However, also the
documentation of palaeo-climate will profit from structural understanding, as they are
the most straight forward access to evaluate stratigraphic integrity.
