SAMCoT - Annual Report 2015

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31 SAMCoT • ANNUAL REPORT 2015
Ice ridge action
Janne Ranta continued with good progress in 2015. He
and Assistant Professor Polojärv addresses ice rubble
accumulations and ice load estimation from finite-discrete
numerical simultions (FEM-DEM). They have submitted a
paper at Cold Regions Science and Technology about statis-
tics related to ice loads and how to achieve high quality
information about ice-structure interaction processes and
ice loads.
The results in the paper suggest that peak ice loads
are clearly affected by few physical ice parameters
only. The study also demonstrates a large scatter in the
data. Consequences of the high scatter were tentatively
discussed in the POAC’15 conference paper from which we
have continued to study ice loads in more detail by focusing
on ice load distributions. At the moment they are writing
a second paper, which focuses on the error margins in
repeated ice load measurements.
Åse Ervik was employed in the autumn 2014 and initiated
the studies on ice ridge action in WP3. Her work builds on
the activity in WP2 and WP1. In 2015 she published a paper
in POAC`15 with initial analysis of the EU funded projects
LOLEIF/STRICE where full scale ice actions on the light-
house Nordstrømsgrund were measured the winters
from 1999 through 2003. Ervik spent the spring at UNIS on
Svalbard where she carried out fieldwork on the land fast
ice around Svalbard and in the Arctic basin.
In the spring of 2015 SAMCoT`s WP3 and WP1 collaborated
on a field work activity on properties of decaying first-
year ice ridges, lead and carried out by Post-doc Aleksey
Shestov and Ervik. The primary objective of the project was
to understand the effects of the new thin, first year, sea ice
regime in the Arctic on energy flux, ice dynamics and the
ice associated ecosystem, and local and global climate.
The expedition took place on the research vessel RV Lance
frozen in and drifting with the young sea ice in the Arctic
Figure WP3_2 snapshots of simulations an advancing ice sheet towards an inclined structure and visualizes how the ice rubble
accumulates in front of the structure.