Ice plasticity has been thoroughly studied, owing to its importance in glaciers and ice sheets dynamics.In particular, its anisotropy (easy basal slip) has been suspected for a long time, then fully characterized 40 years ago. More recently emerged the interest of ice as a model material to study some fundamental aspects of crystalline plasticity. An example is the nature of plastic fluctuations and collective dislocation dynamics. 20 years ago, acoustic emission measurements performed during the deformation of ice single crystals revealed that plastic "flow" proceeds through intermittent dislocation avalanches, power law distributed in size and energy. This means that most of ice plasticity takes place through few, very large avalanches, thus qualifying associated plastic fluctuations as "wild". This launched an intense research activity on plastic intermittency in the Material Science community. The interest of ice in this debate is reviewed, from a comparison with other crystalline materials. In this context, ice appears as an extreme case of plastic intermittency, characterized by scale-free fluctuations, complex space and time correlations as well as avalanche triggering. In other words, ice can be considered as the paradigm of wild plasticity.*Author for correspondence (jerome.weiss@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr).
Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A.crystal/sample scale) dynamics of plastic deformation. We show that ice plastic "flow" actually occurs in a strongly spatially heterogeneous and intermittent way, through dislocation avalanches spanning a huge range of size. We relate this with the plastic anisotropy mentioned above that maximizes the role of long-range elastic interactions in collective dislocation dynamics, and discuss the link with the absence of significant isotropic hardening in ice or of development of an internal characteristic microstructural length scale.This "wild" dynamics, characterized by power law distributions of plastic fluctuations (with infinite variance) [17], strongly contrasts with the plasticity of FCC and BCC metals characterized, for sample sizes larger than few μm, by "mild" (finite variance, Gaussian-like) fluctuations, the development of dislocation sub-structures (e.g. dislocation cells) and isotropic hardening. In this context, ice appears as the paradigm for wild plasticity, including at bulk (>mm) scales.
2.Some specificities of ice plasticityThe fundamentals of ice plasticity have been extensively detailed elsewhere [16,18,19]. Here, the goal is not to give such overview, but instead to focus on some specificities of ice plasticity that are playing a key role in collective dislocation dynamics.
Plastic anisotropyAs already stressed above, plastic anisotropy is the most prominent characteristic of ice plasticity. This has been exemplified by the creep tests reported by Duval and others [6] showing, for a given resolved shear stress, basal slip creep rates orders of magnitude larger than non-basal slip creep rates. It is related to the hexagonal structure of ice Ih, shared with