Experimental study on soil deformation and stress within seabed during ice scour event

Abstract

Ice-Scour Event is a phenomenon that occurs when deformed ice such as an ice ridge comes into contact with seabed. Ice-Scour has been reported to cause damage to communication cables and water intake pipelines. Although most of technical issues against the ice-scour have been focused on estimating the scour depth/burial depth, it will be also important to consider a sub-scour deformation, which means stress transmission or soil deformation within the seabed below the sea ice.
In this study, we carried out basic model experiments related to the sub-scour de Iformation by setting up some test conditions. We found that the stress within the seabed during ice-scouring does not depend on a drift speed of a model ice but an attack angle, and that the model ice with the smaller attack angle is though to cause the soil deformation of larger areas because of restriction/compression of a large amount of soil in front of inclined surface of an ice.