Coulomb Friction and Other Sliding Laws in a Higher-Order Glacier Flow Model

We consider a widely used higher-order glacier flow model with a variety of parametrizations of wall slip, including Coulomb friction, regularized Coulomb friction laws and a power law. Mathematically, the Coulomb friction problem is found to be analogous to a classical friction problem in elasticity theory. We specifically analyze the case in which slip is possible everywhere at the boundary, in which case the weak formulation becomes a semi-coercive convex minimization problem which has a solution only if a solvability condition representing force and torque balance is satisfied. Going beyond previous work, we study the uniqueness of solutions in depth, finding that non-unique solutions are possible under very specialized circumstances. Further, in an extension of work by Campos, Oden and Kikuchi, we show that solutions to the regularized Coulomb friction and power law problems converge to the Coulomb friction problem in appropriate parametric limits, provided the latter is unique, and briefly discuss the implications of possible non-unique solutions for a priori error estimation in numerical approximations.