Estimating the elastic modulus of landfast ice from wave observations

Abstract

Progress in our understanding of wave-ice interactions is currently hindered by the lack of in situ observations and information of sea-ice properties, including the elastic modulus. Here, we estimate the effective elastic modulus of sea ice using observations of waves in ice through the deployment of three open-source geophone recorders on landfast sea ice. From observations of low-frequency dispersive waves, we obtain an estimate of the effective elastic modulus in the range of 0.4-0.7 GPa. This is lower than the purely elastic modulus of the ice estimated at 1 GPa as derived from in situ beam experiments. Importantly, our experimental observation is significantly lower than the default va..