Brandon Montemuro , Georgy Manucharyan

Nares Strait is a major pathway from the Arctic Ocean and an important climate system component. Sea ice's granular nature is pertinent in such straits with small islands where floes propagate by fracturing upon collisions. Since climate models are relatively coarse and use continuous sea ice rheology, they only partially capture the complexities of floe interactions. We use a floe-scale model, SubZero, to explore the role of islands in sea ice transport through Nares Strait. We demonstrate that SubZero can reproduce the crucial observed sea ice characteristics, including the area transport and variance in area fluxes. We found that a size-dependent critical stress criterion was necessary to simulate the power-law exponent in this domain's floe size distribution. Conducting simulations with and without the islands, we demonstrate the effectiveness of floe-scale models in simulating sea ice dynamics in straits and emphasize small islands' crucial role in affecting overall transport.