Ice: the paradigm of wild plasticity

Ice plasticity has been thoroughly studied, owing to its importance in glaciers and ice sheets dynamics. In particular, its anisotropy (easy basal slip) has been suspected for a long time, then fully characterized 40 years ago. More recently emerged the interest of ice as a model material to study some fundamental aspects of crystalline plasticity. An example is the nature of plastic fluctuations and collective dislocation dynamics. Twenty years ago, acoustic emission measurements performed during the deformation of ice single crystals revealed that plastic 'flow' proceeds through intermittent dislocation avalanches, power law distributed in size and energy. This means that most of ice plasticity takes place through few, very large avalanches, thus qualifying associated plastic fluctuations as 'wild'. This launched an intense research activity on plastic intermittency in the Material Science community. The interest of ice in this debate is reviewed, from a comparison with other crystalline materials. In this context, ice appears as an extreme case of plastic intermittency, characterized by scale-free fluctuations, complex space and time correlations as well as avalanche triggering. In other words, ice can be considered as the paradigm of wild plasticity. This article is part of the theme issue 'The physics and chemistry of ice: scaffolding across scales, from the viability of life to the formation of planets'.