`Prudhoe Bay offshore ice islands`

Ice as a structural material. Civil engineers from MIT designed man-made islands with sloping rock walls so accreting sea ice would build up above the waterline. Cites Professor Kingery's mid-1950s ice strength research as the academic foundation.

Ice is a structural material. In the mid '50s, Professor Kingery in Ceramics had a big project to look at the strength of ice as a structural material. It didn't really become an important structural material until they started building the oil fields in Prudhoe Bay in Alaska. They built man-made islands to go out there into the ocean, 100 feet deep. They built low islands. Those islands were designed by a group of civil engineers who used to be here at MIT. They would build the islands such that as the ice started to form, the islands have nice sloping walls of rock, and the ice would just build up and be pushed up above the ocean. Ice can obviously be a structural material. Anybody who goes ice fishing knows that it can be a structural material — except for the times when it's not thick enough.