A Marginal Ice Zone (MIZ) is a dynamic region of sea ice between the open ocean and the interior pack ice. It is exposed to energetic forcing from the ocean, which leaves the sea ice broken and fragmented. The Antarctic MIZ in particular is a vast, inhomogeneous layer of sea ice that undergoes enormous seasonal changes in coverage - from 6.3 million km2 (about 5 times the size of Colorado) in late September to 1.5 million km2 by February.
Traditionally MIZs have been modelled as continuous materials. However, it is difficult to escape the fact that an MIZ is composed of distinct ice floes spanning many length scales: It is essentially a granular material. I will discuss some of the attempts to understand the rheological behavior of this complex material using a granular description