Modelling thermomechanical ice deformation using a GPU-based implicit pseudo-transient method (FastICE v1.0)

Accurate predictions of future sea level rise require numerical models that capture the complex thermomechanical feedbacks in rapidly deforming ice. Shear margins, grounding zones and the basal sliding interface are locations of particular interest where the stress-field is complex and fundamentally three-dimensional. These transition zones are prone to thermomechanical localisation, which can be captured numerically only with high temporal and spatial resolution. Thus, better understanding the coupled physical processes that govern these boundaries of localised strain necessitates a non-linear, full Stokes model that affords high resolution and scales well in three dimensions. This paper’s goal is to contribute to the growing toolbox for modelling thermomechanical deformation in ice by levering GPU accelerators’ parallel scalability. We propose a numerical model that relies on pseudo-transient iterations to solve the implicit thermomechanical coupling between ice motion and temperature involving shear-heating and a temperature-dependant ice viscosity. Our method is based on the finite-difference discretisation, and we implement the pseudo-time integration in a matrix-free way. We benchmark the mechanical Stokes solver against the finite-element code Elmer/Ice and report good agreement among the results. We showcase a parallel version of the solver to run on GPU-accelerated distributed memory machines, reaching a parallel efficiency of 93 %. We show that our model is particularly useful for improving our process-based understanding of flow localisation in the complex transition zones bounding rapidly moving ice.