A short history of the thermomechanical theory and modelling of glaciers and ice sheets

Observations of glacier flow and explanations of its origin started as early as the 18th century. Several mechanisms were suggested before gravity-driven viscous flow became the accepted theory of glacier flow in the 1950s, the early years of the Journal of Glaciology. Since the viscosity of ice is strongly temperature-dependent, the topic of glacier and ice-sheet dynamics became essentially a fluid-dynamical problem. The availability of growing computing power turned the field of glacier mechanics and thermodynamics into a field of numerical modelling with increasing sophistication.