Solitary flexural-gravity waves in three dimensions.

The focus of this work is on three-dimensional nonlinear flexural-gravity waves, propagating at the interface between a fluid and an ice sheet. The ice sheet is modelled using the special Cosserat theory of hyperelastic shells satisfying Kirchhoff's hypothesis, presented in (Plotnikov & Toland. 2011 Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 369 , 2942-2956 (doi:10.1098/rsta.2011.0104)). The fluid is assumed inviscid and incompressible, and the flow irrotational. A numerical method based on boundary integral equation techniques is used to compute solitary waves and forced waves to Euler's equations.This article is part of the theme issue 'Modelling of sea-ice phenomena'.