Thayer Professor Awarded Grant for Ice Research

A unique ice research laboratory will be installed at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering over the next nine months. The project is being underwritten by a major Department of Defense grant of $194,000 awarded to Prof. Erland M. Schulson. The ice lab, which will occupy 400 sq. ft. in Cummings Hall, will consist of two cold rooms resembling big freezers. Funds from the grant will also be used to purchase a highly specialized machine that tests the strength and brittleness of ice under pressure.

Abundant for thousands of years, ice has only recently become a material of considerable economic importance in resource exploration. A 1980 U.S. Geological Survey estimated that of the total undiscovered domestic oil and gas reserves, about 60 percent of the oil and 50 percent of the gas may lie beneath ice-encrusted waters off the Alaskan coast. However, ice, which usually moves in large sheets, can be handled only if the forces it exerts against such structures as drilling rigs or ships can be studied and understood.

Prof. Schulson's aim is to develop better means for predicting how much pressure is needed to break up such sheets of ice, knowledge that will have application in the design of drilling rigs and ships passing through the Arctic, and also in determining how much weight the ice sheets can support. The Department of Defense grant complements an earlier grant of $250,000 given to Thayer by Mobil Oil Co. That grant is helping to finance the planning and start-up costs for the ice lab as well as some graduate research.