Global existence and uniqueness for Hibler's visco-plastic sea-ice model

In this paper, we prove global existence and uniqueness of weak solutions to the momentum equations of Hibler's visco-plastic model for the dynamics of the arctic sea-ice covers. Although Hibler's model is standardly used in global climate simulations, there are only few rigorous mathematical results so far that mainly concern local-in-time well-posedness of globally regularized variants. Here, we consider Hibler's original model with local cut-off for arbitrarily small and large strain rates. Degeneracy and plasticity of the stress tensor hold in this range.