Water-Pressure Coupling of Sliding and Bed Deformation: I. Water System

Abstract Analysis of the likely behavior of a water system developed between ice and an unconsolidated glacier bed suggests that, in the absence of channelized sources of melt water, the system will approximate a film of varying thickness. The effective pressure in such a film will be proportional to the basal shear stress but inversely proportional to the fraction of the bed occupied by the film. These hypotheses allow calculation of the sliding and bed-deformation velocities of a glacier from the water supply and basal shear stress, as discussed in the second and third papers in this series.