Physical Properties of Ice
The physical properties of polar snow and ice are of fundamental interest in Glaciology. They are involved in a large field of topics like in ice sheet modelling and monitoring, mass balance studies, ice-ocean and ice-atmosphere interactions, climate reconstructions, snow metamorphosis and firn densification.
Ice can be considered as a perfect model medium to study basic questions in geology and material science because it can be produced easily, it is simple to cut even into thin plates, quite easy to form and process under controlled boundary conditions.
Polar firn and ice is available in all states of sintering and in a range of settings of very slow deformation and mechanical stress over hundreds of thousand years. That time spans are definitely not able to reach in laboratory experiments.