Monitoring ice thickness and elastic properties from the measurement of leaky guided waves: A laboratory experiment.

The decline of Arctic sea ice extent is one of the most spectacular signatures of global warming, and studies converge to show that this decline has been accelerating over the last four decades, with a rate that is not reproduced by climate models. To improve these models, relying on comprehensive and accurate field data is essential. While sea ice extent and concentration are accurately monitored from microwave imagery, an accurate measure of its thickness is still lacking. Moreover, measuring observables related to the mechanical behavior of the ice (such as Young's modulus, Poisson's ratio, etc.) could provide better insights in the understanding of sea ice decline, by completing current knowledge so far acquired mostly from radar and sonar data. This paper aims at demonstrating on the laboratory scale that these can all be estimated simultaneously by measuring seismic waves guided in the ice layer. The experiment consisted of leaving a water tank in a cold room in order to grow an ice layer at its surface. While its thickness was increasing, ultrasonic guided waves were generated with a piezoelectric source, and measurements were subsequently inverted to infer the thickness and mechanical properties of the ice with very good accuracy.

Tracking fluids in multiple scattering and highly porous materials: Toward applications in non-destructive testing and seismic monitoring.

Seismic and ultrasonic waves are sometimes used to track fluid injections, propagation, infiltrations in complex material, including geological and civil engineered ones. In most cases, one use the acoustic velocity changes as a proxy for water content evolution. Here we propose to test an alternative seismic or acoustic observable: the waveform decorrelation. We use a sample of compacted millimetric sand as a model medium of highly porous multiple scattering materials. We fill iteratively the sample with water, and track changes in ultrasonic waveforms acquired for each water level. We take advantage of the high sensitivity of diffuse coda waves (late arrivals) to track small water elevation in the material. We demonstrate that in the mesoscopic regime where the wavelength, the grain size and the porosity are in the same order of magnitude, Coda Wave Decorrelation (waveform change) is more sensitive to fluid injection than Coda Wave Interferometry (apparent velocity change). This observation is crucial to interpret fluid infiltration in concrete with ultrasonic record changes, as well as fluid injection in volcanoes or snow melt infiltration in rocky glaciers. In these applications, Coda Wave Decorrelation might be an extremely interesting tool for damage assessment and alert systems.