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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.

A Newtonian fluid model of an ice sheet does not determine its grounding line volume flux per unit width from thickness alone without a basal law and matching conditions. Let $h_G$ be flotation thickness, $\nu$ the ice kinematic viscosity, $g$ gravity and $g^{\prime }=g(1-\rho /{\rho }_w)$ the reduced gravity. A local cubic scaling can be illustrated by patching two explicit approximations on a horizontal bed.

For no-slip Newtonian shallow-ice flux, $q=-g{h}^3{h}_x/(3\nu )$. In a locally steady region with negligible accumulation, mass conservation gives $u=q/h$ and $u_x=-q{h}_x/h^2$. Imposing the unbuttressed Newtonian grounding-line stress condition $u_x=g^{\prime }h/(8\nu )$ at the same matching section then yieldsThis is the result of the stated elementary patch, not a resolved grounding-zone solution. It shows why a bare numerical coefficient cannot be inferred from Newtonian rheology alone.

Basal sliding, longitudinal stresses and contact constraints require a transition calculation; they can change the flux-thickness law as well as its coefficient. A systematic Stokes flow treatment matches the outer shearing/sliding sheet to an extensional boundary layer and supplies effective flotation and flux conditions.^[ref] The patch above should therefore be used as a transparent closure example, rather than as a universal predictive grounding-line law.