Comprehensive assessment of stress calculations for crevasse depths and testing with crevasse penetration as damage

Reynolds, Benjamin; Nowicki, Sophie; Poinar, Kristin

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-19-5045-2025

Articles | Volume 19, issue 10

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-19-5045-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-19-5045-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 19, issue 10

Research article

|

24 Oct 2025

Research article |

| 24 Oct 2025

Comprehensive assessment of stress calculations for crevasse depths and testing with crevasse penetration as damage

Benjamin Reynolds, Sophie Nowicki, and Kristin Poinar

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-19-5045-2025-supplement

Data sets

MEaSUREs ITS_LIVE Regional Glacier and Ice Sheet Surface Velocities. (NSIDC-0776, Version 1) A. S. Gardner et al. https://doi.org/10.5067/6II6VW8LLWJ7

MEaSUREs Multi-year Reference Velocity Maps of the Antarctic Ice Sheet (NSIDC-0761, Version 1) E. Rignot et al. https://doi.org/10.5067/FB851ZIZYX5O

MEaSUREs BedMachine Antarctica (NSIDC-0756, Version 3) M. Morlighem https://doi.org/10.5067/FPSU0V1MWUB6

Interactive computing environment

Resistive stress / Nye crevasse formulation demo code for "Comprehensive Assessment of Stress Calculations for Crevasse Depths and Testing with Crevasse Penetration as Damage" (v2) Benjamin Reynolds et al. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15420465

Short summary

Stress in glaciers, ice sheets, and ice shelves causes crevasses, which are important drivers of retreat and sea level rise. We find that different assumptions found in the literature lead to significantly (up to a factor of 2) different crevasse depths and recommend a calculation based on observed ice flow patterns. We find that other stress calculations likely overpredict ice shelf vulnerability to hydrofracture.