Forced and Unforced Flexural-gravity Solitary Waves

Flexural-gravity waves beneath an ice sheet are investigated. Forced waves generated by a moving load as well as freely propagating solitary waves are considered for the nonlinear problem as proposed by Plotnikov and Toland 21. In the unforced case, a Hamiltonian reformulation of the governing equations is presented in three dimensions. A weakly nonlinear analysis is performed to derive a cubic nonlinear Schrödinger equation near the minimum phase velocity in two dimensions. Both steady and time-dependent fully nonlinear computations are presented in the two-dimensional case, and the influence of finite depth is also discussed.