Vehicles and aircraft on floating ice

Abstract

Ice roads and ice runways are a common feature of Arctic and Antarctic transportation: cars are driven across floating ice, whether for pleasure or for economic reasons such as avoiding a circuitous route around a bay or lake; logging trucks take short cuts from forest to mill; and aircraft routinely land and take off. Occasionally, catastrophic breakthrough and consequent injury or loss of life occurs. Although theoretical work to calculate the deflection profile due to a moving load is well established^1–3, there has been little progress experimentally and early studies^4,5 were subject to error because of the type of transducer used. Recently there has been a renewed interest in the problem which has led to several theoretical papers^6–9 and to the collection of a small quantity of high-quality data^10,11. We report here some preliminary results from a new and complete set of experiments done on Antarctic sea ice using strain gauges to measure directly the strain induced by the vehicle. The results show excellent agreement with theory in all respects.