ALBERT

Description: Fabric (distribution of crystallographic orientations) profile along the full NEEM ice core, Greenland, is presented in this work. Data were measured in the field by an Automatic Ice Texture Analyzer every 10 m, from 33 m down to 2461 m depth. The fabric evolves from a slightly anisotropic fabric at the top, toward a strong single maximum at about 2300 m, which is typical of a deformation pattern mostly driven by uniaxial compression and simple shearing. A sharp increase in the fabric strengthening is observed at the Holocene to Wisconsin climatic transition. A similar strengthening, toward an anisotropic single maximum-type fabric, has been observed in several ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, and can be attributed to a positive feedback between changes in ice viscosity at the climatic transition, and the impact of a shear component of stress. Centimeter scale abrupt texture (fabric and microstructure) variations are observed in the bottom part of the core. Their positions are in good agreement with the folding hypothesis used for a climatic reconstruction by Dahl-Jensen and co authors (2013). Comparison is made to two others ice cores drilled along the same ridge; the GRIP ice core drilled at the summit of the ice sheet, and the NorthGRIP ice core, drilled 325 km to the NNW of the summit along the ridge, and 365 km upstream from NEEM. The fabric profile clearly reflects the increase in shear deformation when moving NW along the ridge from GRIP to NorthGRIP and NEEM. The difference in fabric profiles between NEEM and NorthGRIP also evidences a stronger lateral extension associated with a sharper ridge at NorthGRIP. References: Dahl-Jensen, D. and 120 co-authors. Eemian interglacial reconstructed from a Greenland folded ice core, Nature, 493, 489–493, 2013.

Description: Ice is the most frequent mineral on the Earth’s surface, however experiences conditions comparable to silicate minerals at high metamorphic grades. In all natural conditions ice is a hot material with homologous temperatures between 0.9 and 0.7 at least. Under such circumstances recrystallization plays a decisive role in governing the state and thus the behaviour of the material. This has been recognized and interpreted in many ice cores in the last decades (Faria et al. in press a) assigning recrystallization regimes to ice sheet depth ranges. This assignment made use of microstructure observations (mainly grain size) and estimated boundary conditions (temperature and stress/strain amounts) which change systematically with depth. To generalize the use of recrystallization regimes we decouple their occurrence from the ice sheet depth information and connect them directly to the activators and causes: strain rate and temperature (Faria et al. in press b). References: Faria, S. H.; Weikusat, I. & Azuma, N. The Microstructure of Polar Ice. Part I: Highlights from ice core research. Journal of Structural Geology , in press a, DOI: 10.1016/j.jsg.2013.09.010 Faria, S. H.; Weikusat, I. & Azuma, N. The Microstructure of Polar Ice. Part II: State of the Art. Journal of Structural Geology , in press b, DOI: 10.1016/j.jsg.2013.11.003