Measuring the local mechanical properties of a floating elastic sheet

Polar regions are covered by sea ice, which can be seen as a thin solid elastic sheet with heterogeneous mechanical properties. The dynamics of deformation of a floating solid sheet is primarily governed by gravity, water density, and the flexural modulus, which depends on its mechanical properties, namely, the thickness, the Young modulus, and the Poisson ratio. Noninvasive methods from seismology can retrieve these three parameters from sheet deformation dynamics. In this article we develop another method to extract locally the flexural modulus of a floating thin elastic sheet from the spatiotemporal deformations of the sheet. We perform laboratory experiments to test the accuracy and the robustness of this method on silicon membranes of controlled mechanical properties. Using patches of different thicknesses and shapes, we eventually draw maps of sheet thickness, with a subwavelength spatial resolution.