Can Thermal Bending Fracture Ice Shelves?

Visco-elastic plates will bend if the temperature on one side is cooled. If the plate is constrained to float, as for sea ice floes, this bending will lead to tensile stresses that can fracture the ice. The hydroacoustic regime below sea ice displays increased fracture-sourced noise when air temperatures above the ice cools with the diurnal cycle. The McMurdo Ice Shelf, Antarctica, also displays a massive increase in seismicity during the cooling phase of the diurnal cycle, and this motivates the question: Can surface cooling (or other forcing with thermal consequences) drive through-thickness fracture leading to iceberg calving? Past study of this question for sea ice gives an upper limit of ice-plate thickness (order meters) for which diurnal-scale thermal bending fracture can occur; but could cooling with longer time scales induce fracture of thicker ice plates? Given the seismic evidence of thermal bending fracture on the McMurdo Ice Shelf, the authors examine this question further.