Field Studies and Modeling of the Breakup of Antarctic Sea Ice

In-situ experiments investigated the constitutive and fracture
behavior of edge-notched, square plate full-thickness specimens of
first-year floating sea ice in McMurdo Sound. The dataset contains the
physical properties included temperature, salinity and density
profiles, the microstructure of the ice sheet, the cyclic loading and
fracture response and acoustic emission.

The mechanical and fracture properties of the annual sea ice in
Antarctic were studied to develop improved, physically based models of
the breakup process. The fieldwork took place during the Austral
spring 2001 in McMurdo Sound. Nine fracture tests and four tensile
tests were conducted on 5m x 5m and 10m x 10m edge-notched square
plates of ice, the ice thickness being 1.4m. The experiments employed
loading ramps either to a specified load level or to tensile failure,
or cyclic loading involved the application of a haversine waveform
with a range of peak load levels and frequencies from 10-3 to 5 x 10-2
Hz. Field characterizations included salinity, density and temperature
profiles. The crystallography of the ice sheet was examined using
standard thin sections from 0.1m-diameter cores, and micrographs were
obtained on-site from these sections to document the sub-grain
structure. The crack opening displacements were measures at three
points along the traction-free crack surface:
crack-mouth-opening-displacement (CMOD),
intermediate-crack-opening-displacement (COD) and
near-crack-tip-opening-displacement (NCTOD). Gages were also placed
ahead of the crack tip to identify the crack opening displacement when
the crack advanced. Two acoustic emission (AE) transducers were
mounted on the ice surface to monitor the micro-cracking levels in the
crack tip process zone.