Hot Ice and Wondrous Strange Snow - Three-Phase Mixtures in Glaciology

Explore the complex world of ice, water, and water vapor mixtures in this 50-minute AGU Fall Meeting 2012 Nye Lecture. Delve into the physics-based models used in glaciology over the past 40 years, examining their applications in snowmelt prediction, avalanche forecasting, impurity movement in ice cores, and polar ice sheet densification. Investigate the challenges of developing accurate thermo-mechanical models for these sensitive materials, and learn about new measurement techniques such as neutron-scattering for snow density and radar for glacier ice water content. Discover the potential of scaling-up microstructure models to improve mixture-scale constitutive relations, and understand the importance of balancing complex behavior representation with practical averaging in mixture theory approaches for glaciological problems.