Christian Schoof developed a first-principles description of where a marine ice sheet detaches from bedrock and becomes a floating ice shelf. His 2011 analysis treated this grounding line as a contact boundary in Stokes flow, with different stress conditions on grounded and floating regions.[ref]
The analysis derives boundary conditions for ice thickness and flux from the local contact problem. Additional boundary layers make velocity and surface slope connect smoothly, showing why a depth-averaged flow model needs carefully matched grounding-line conditions rather than an arbitrarily prescribed junction.
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