Ice-infiltrated sediment, or frozen fringe, is responsible for phenomena such as frost heave, ice lenses and metres of debris-rich ice under glaciers. Understanding frozen fringes is important as frost heave is responsible for damaging infrastructure at high latitudes and sediment freeze-on at the base of glaciers can modulate subglacial friction, influencing the rate of global sea level rise. Here we describe the thermomechanics of liquid water flow and freezing in ice-saturated sediments, focusing on the conditions relevant for subglacial environments. The force balance that governs the frozen fringe thickness depends on the weight of the overlying material, the thermomolecular force between ice and sediments across liquid premelted films and the water pressure required by Darcy flow. We combine this mechanical model with an enthalpy method that conserves energy across phase change interfaces on a fixed computational grid. The force balance and enthalpy model together determine the evolution of the frozen fringe thickness and our simulations predict frost heave rates and ice lens spacing. Our model accounts for premelting at ice–sediment contacts, partial ice saturation of the pore space, water flow through the fringe, the thermodynamics of the ice–water–sediment interface and vertical force balance. We explicitly account for the formation of ice lenses, regions of pure ice that cleave the fringe at the depth where the interparticle force vanishes. Our model results allow us to predict the thickness of a frozen fringe and the spacing of ice lenses in subaerial and subglacial sediments.
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This content will become publicly available on June 28, 2025
Presence of Frozen Fringe Impacts Soft‐Bedded Slip Relationship
Glaciers and ice streams flowing over sediment beds commonly have a layer of ice‐rich debris adhered to their base, known as a “frozen fringe,” but its impact on basal friction is unknown. We simulated basal slip over granular beds with a cryogenic ring shear device while ice infiltrated the bed to grow a fringe, and measured the frictional response under different effective stresses and slip speeds. Frictional resistance increased with increasing slip speed until it plateaued at the frictional strength of the till, closely resembling the regularized Coulomb slip law associated with clean ice over deformable beds. We hypothesize that this arises from deformation in a previously unidentified zone of weakly frozen sediments at the fringe's base, which is highly sensitive to temperature and stress gradients. We show how a rheologic model for ice‐rich debris coupled with the thermomechanics of fringe growth can account for the regularized Coulomb behavior.
more » « less- PAR ID:
- 10527289
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Geophysical Union
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Geophysical Research Letters
- Volume:
- 51
- Issue:
- 12
- ISSN:
- 0094-8276
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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