ICE SCOUR MECHANISMS

Seabed soil deformation by grounded ice determine the forces required for scour to occur, and has important implications for pipelines. If large deformation extend deep into the ground, a pipeline might still be damaged even if it were buried below the maximum gouge depth. This paper describes an approach to the problem of determining how far below the ice the gouging deformations extend. It applies soil cutting theory and derives deformation modes from discontinuous velocity field theory developed in other areas of soil mechanics.