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Science 3 March 2006:
Vol. 311. no. 5765, pp. 1267 - 1269
DOI: 10.1126/science.1121296
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Reports

Grain Size-Sensitive Creep in Ice II

Tomoaki Kubo,1* William B. Durham,2 Laura A. Stern,3 Stephen H. Kirby3

Rheological experiments on fine-grained water ice II at low strain rates reveal a creep mechanism that dominates at conditions of low stress. Using cryogenic scanning electron microscopy, we observed that a change in stress exponent from 5 to 2.5 correlates strongly with a decrease in grain size from about 40 to 6 micrometers. The grain size–sensitive creep of ice II demonstrated here plausibly dominates plastic strain at the low-stress conditions in the interior of medium- to large-sized icy moons of the outer solar system.

1 Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Faculty of Sciences, Kyushu University, Fukuoka 812-8581, Japan.
2 University of California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA 94550, USA.
3 U.S. Geological Survey Mail Stop 977, 345 Middlefield Road, Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: kubotomo{at}geo.kyushu-u.ac.jp

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THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Multiwalled ice helixes and ice nanotubes.
J. Bai, J. Wang, and X. C. Zeng (2006)
PNAS 103, 19664-19667
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