Past, present and impendent hydroelastic challenges in the polar and subpolar seas

Current and emergent advances are examined on the topic of hydroelasticity theory applied to natural sea ice responding to the action of ocean surface waves and swell, with attention focused on methods that portray sea ice more faithfully as opposed to those that oversimplify interactions with a poor imitation of reality. A succession of authors have confronted and solved by various means the demanding applied mathematics associated with ocean waves (i) entering a vast sea-ice plate, (ii) travelling between plates of different thickness, (iii) impinging on a pressure ridge, (iv) affecting a single ice floe with arbitrarily specified physical and material properties, and (v) many such features or mixtures thereof. The next step is to embed simplified versions of these developments in an oceanic general circulation model for forecasting purposes. While targeted on specific sea-ice situations, many of the reported results are equally applicable to the interaction of waves with very large floating structures, such as pontoons, floating airports and mobile offshore bases.