2025/12/09 by Vargas, Alex J., Ran, Ranjiangshang, Burton, Justin C.
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Medicine · #Arctic and Antarctic ice dynamics #Cryospheric studies and observations #FOS: Physical sciences #Geophysics (physics.geo-ph) #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft) #Winter Sports Injuries and Performance
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.08907
openalex publication_date 2025/12/09 · openalex created_date 2025/12/11 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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, which is a universal but unexplained feature reported in experiments. Due to its transient nature, the model exhibits fractional power-law exponents in the stress dependence of the strain rate minimum, which has been conventionally interpreted as independent physical processes. Taken together, we provide a compact, mechanistic framework for transient ice rheology that generalizes to other polycrystalline materials and can be integrated into constitutive laws for ice-sheet models.