Ice appears in many forms: as snow, as glacier, as sea ice, river ice, as clouds, as interplanetary dust and bodies (yes, even ice cream is a form a ice!). Ice behaves and appears in all these environments in different crystalline and amorphous forms, with different properties and deformation behaviour. Furthermore, ice has special properties: the high vapor pressure in porous ice makes metamorphism by vapor diffusion dominant, while liquid grain boundary phases are important in crystalline ice at near solidus conditions.

The interdisciplinary session should bring together the researchers from different fields, but working on a similar topic: understanding the physics and mechanics of ice by better understanding its microstructure. We wish to encourage contributions from glaciology, structural geology, mineral physics, material sciences, the atmospheric and planetary sciences, and the food industry.

We welcome contributions dealing with all aspects of ice microstructure in all environments: including processes of snow-firn-ice transitions; the influence of recrystallization, melting and metamorphism on the flow of ice sheets, glaciers, ice caps on other planets than earth and the crust of icy moons or comets. This session is a contribution from the research networking programme Micro-Dynamics of ICE Micro-DICE www.esf.org/microdice