Ice Sheet Indentation Resistance in the Creep Domain

The force exerted by a moving ice sheet on an offshore structure is known to vary strongly with the geometrical conditions at the contact with the structure and with the rate of ice movement, resulting in a wide spectrum of failure modes including both in-plane and out-of-plane failures of either brittle or plastic type. In this paper attention is concentrated to only one limiting case, in which the ice sheet moves so slowly that no fracture occurs at the contact with the structure, but the ice undergoes only in-plane creep deformations.