| Summary: | The Sea Ice Dynamics Experiment (SIDEx) was designed to investigate the interaction of ice stress, strain, and fracture over meter-to-kilometer spatial scales as ice fractured and subsequently deformed. SIDEx addresses gaps in knowledge about how stress propagates through a heterogenous sea ice cover. These knowledge gaps arise in part due to past difficulties effectively measuring stress and strain at meter to kilometer (m-km) scales across a realistic, heterogeneous ice cover. SIDEx was a collection of field campaigns during 2018 through 2023. SIDEx employs recent advances in satellite monitoring, high-precisions GNSS ice tracking, seismo-acoustics fracture detection, in situ stress gages, and surveying methods (including the use of robotic total stations and Gamma Portable RADAR Interferometer strain observations) to monitor strains and cracking of sea ice. The centerpiece of this work was a field camp in the Beaufort Sea on drifting pack ice during February-April 2021 which sought to observe stress-strain-fracture simultaneously with an array of different sensing equipment. The core study area was an approximately 2x2km area of ice, with intensive measurements on that area nested within arrays of measurements at increasing scale around it. Within the core area, observations of stress (using vibrating wire gages), strain (using GPRI, laser systems, and GNSS) and fracture (from seismo-acoustics) were collected to relate floe scale strains and forces to observe stress. Arrays of buoys and satellite imagery around the perimeter of the area provide information about forces at the boundaries of the study domain. The field camp for collecting these observations was established 26 February 2021, with equipment largely deployed by 13 March, and crewed until 19 March 2021. Thereafter, the autonomous equipment was permitted to operate until 21 April 2021 and a suite of expendable buoys (Ice Mass Balance buoys, SatIce Buoys recording geodetic precision GNSS and GPS Ice Trackers) was left and continued to operate until they failed up to 2 years later. The program also included work on Elson Lagoon, Utqiagvik during fall, winter, and spring 2018-2019, 2019-2020, 2022-2023, largely targeted at understanding the thermal expansion coefficient of sea ice. And SIDEx participated in the ICEx Beaufort Sea Field camps in March-April 2020, and the MOSAiC field campaign between November 2019 and June 2020.
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