The Relevance of Grain Dissection for Grain Size Reduction in Polar Ice: Insights from Numerical Models and Ice Core Microstructure Analysis
Journal: Frontiers in Earth Science
Year: 2017

The flow of ice depends on the properties of the aggregate of individual ice crystals, such as grain size or lattice orientation distributions. Therefore, an understanding of the processes controlling ice micro-dynamics is needed to ultimately develop a physically based macroscopic ice flow law. We investigated the relevance of the process of grain dissection as a grain-size-modifying process in natural ice. For that purpose, we performed numerical multi-process microstructure modelling and anal