Abstract

Sea ice is a granular material composed of interacting elements, called floes, of different and evolving sizes and shapes. Contemporary numerical models of sea ice, although incorporating aspects of granular material dynamics, do not realistically represent the evolution of floe size distribution, which is affected by and upon which depend a myriad of dynamical and thermodynamical processes. Although this problem is theoretically, numerically and experimentally challenging, there has been significant progress over the past decade thanks to many international collaborative efforts, especially through revisiting marginal ice zone dynamics where surface gravity waves exert a strong control on floe size. This presentation will provide an overview of the theoretical and experimental knowledge on sea ice break-up and floe size distribution and will discuss how this topic is handled analytically in models.