Time Domain Vibration Analysis of Cracked Ice Shelf

Understanding the effect of cracks on ice shelf vibrations is crucial for assessing their structural integrity, predicting possible breakup events, and understanding their interactions with the surrounding environment. In this work, a novel approach to modelling the simulation of cracked ice shelf vibrations using thin beam approximation along with cracked beam boundary conditions is proposed. A simplified model was used in which the ice shelf was modelled as a thin elastic plate floating on water of a constant depth. The crack was modelled as a connected spring condition, a model which is standard in other fields but which has not been applied to ice shelves. The boundary conditions assumed that there was no flow of energy into the open water, and two possible boundary conditions were considered: no pressure and no flux. The focus of this work is to show how we can simulate the motion of an ice shelf with a crack, and this is the first step towards modelling the effect of crack and crack propagation on ice shelf breakup.