A microstructural rheological model for transient creep in polycrystalline ice

February 09, 2026

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📝 Original Info

Title: A microstructural rheological model for transient creep in polycrystalline ice
ArXiv ID: 2512.08907
Date: 2025-12-09
Authors: Alex J. Vargas, Ranjiangshang Ran, Justin C. Burton

📝 Abstract

The slow creep of glacial ice plays a key role in sea-level rise, yet its transient deformation remains poorly understood. Glen's flow law, where strain rate is simply a function of stress, cannot predict the time-dependent creep behavior observed in experiments. Here we present a physics-based rheological model that captures all three regimes of transient creep in polycrystalline ice. The key components of the model are a series of Kelvin-Voigt mechanical elements that produce a power-law (Andrade) creep, and a single viscous element with microstructure and stress dependence that represents reorientation in the polycrystalline grains. The interplay between these components produces a minimum in the strain rate at approximately 1% strain, w...

📄 Full Content

Accurately predicting future sea-level rise hinges on reliable models of polar ice sheet dynamics, which depend sensitively on the rheology of ice [1,2]. Polar regions are warming nearly four times faster than the global average [3,4], accelerating the mass loss of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets that together store over 99% of Earth's freshwater ice [5,6]. Under high emissions scenarios, global sea-level rise by 2100 could be as high as 1 meter [7][8][9]. Projections of this kind are controlled by large-scale ice sheet models, whose flow laws are rooted in constitutive descriptions of ice rheology t

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