Dislocation Creep of Ice At Glaciological Pressures and Temperatures

Abstract:

The Glen law, a power law between effective strain rate ε_dot and effective stress τ of the form ε_dot=Aτⁿ, where A is a temperature-dependent parameter, and n is the stress exponent of value 3, attributed to dislocation creep, has underpinned models and calculations of glacier flow for over six decades. Compilations of ice creep data from tests at ambient and elevated confining pressures, however, suggest that dislocation creep of ice is characterized by a value of n=4, not 3. While high-pressure experiments on ice provide the best constraints on the dislocation creep regime and have consistently yielded a stress exponent of ~4, most of these tests have been conducted at much-lower-than-glaciological temperatures (Durham et al., 1992). To investigate dislocation creep of ice at glaciological conditions, we deformed samples at temperatures ≥264 K and elevated confining pressures up to ~30 MPa, the maximum cryostatic pressure in the ice sheets. Samples were formed by flooding evacuated cylindrical compacts of distilled-water seed ice of particle sizes 0.18-0.25 mm or 1-1.6 mm at 273 K, followed by freezing at 243 K. Each indium-jacketed specimen was deformed in compression in a gas-medium apparatus at a single constant displacement rate to ~20% strain, at nominally constant strain rates of from 10^-6 to 10^-3 s^-1. In each test, we obtain the peak stress after ~2-3% strain and the steady-state flow stress at larger strains. Plots of strain rate vs. both peak stress and flow stress yield a value of n=4, consistent with previous data from higher-pressure, lower-temperature tests (Durham et al., 1992) and from some ambient pressure experiments (Goldsby and Kohlstedt, 2001), and with models of climb-limited dislocation creep (Weertman, 1968). At stresses <3 MPa, tests on the finer-grained samples show a slight decrease in n to a value <4, while data for the coarser-grained samples show no such transition, consistent with the onset of dislocation-accommodated grain boundary sliding (GBS) in the finer-grained samples at low stresses (Goldsby and Kohlstedt, 2001). Our data demonstrate that the Glen law is an average of two creep regimes - dislocation creep proper, with n=4, and dislocation-accommodated GBS, with n≈2 - and fails to accurately describe the rheological behavior of ice over the broad range of strain rates in natural ice bodies.