Characterizing horizontally-polarized shear and infragravity vibrational modes in the Arctic sea ice cover using...

The deployment of three drifting seismic stations on the Arctic sea ice during the winter of 2014-2015 with station inter-spacing between 30 and 80 km enables the characterization of the coherent seismic wavefield at these scales through the use of array methods. Two distinct vibrational modes are observed, corresponding to the fast and non-dispersive horizontally-polarized shear (SH) mode and the slow and dispersive flexural, infragravity mode (ice swell). The excitation of these two modes is not synchronous. The activation of the infragravity mode is linked to the arrival of energetic, dispersive wavetrains that can be readily seen on individual spectrograms, and that, as previous studies have shown, are likely to have their origins in distant storms. In contrast, the SH mode is excited at other time intervals and cannot be isolated on the recording of single stations due to the broadband and emergent nature of these wavetrains; given the horizontal polarization of these waves, the authors hypothesize that SH waves are caused by episodes of rapid SH deformation along major leads located outside the station network. The existence of horizontally-polarized waves propagating over long distances opens the possibility of monitoring ice deformation at the scale of the Arctic basin with unprecedented time resolution.