This award will provide funds for the partial support of an International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (IUTAM) symposium on Scaling Laws in Ice Mechanics and Ice Dynamics, to be held in Fairbanks, Alaska, in June 2000. The IUTAM is one of the components of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG), a non-governmental international scientific organization.
The purpose of IUTAM symposia is to bring together researchers who have made significant contributions to the study of ice on various scales with those who have made significant contributions to the mechanics of heterogeneous media in other fields.
Over the last few decades the analysis of composite materials has required the development of thermodynamic constitutive laws for materials comprised of discrete phases. These principles may be applied to sea ice when viewed as such a material, i.e. its phases being multi-year floes, thick first-year floes, and ridges in a matrix of thin first-year ice, with varying degrees of damage, i.e. cracks and leads. At this time there is no clear understanding of the range of applicability of different constitutive laws, and how the behavior of ice at small scales is linked to its behavior at geophysical scales. A major objective of the symposium is to establish an organized approach to an understanding of the scaling problem in the ice dynamics and ice mechanics community through the exchange of ideas with leaders in the heterogeneous materials research community.
