Time-step limits for stable solutions of the ice-sheet equation

Various spatial discretizations for the ice sheet are compared for accuracy against analytical solutions in one and two dimensions. The computational efficiency of various iterated and non-iterated marching schemes is compared. The stability properties of different marching schemes, with and without iterations on the non-linear equations, are compared. Newton-Raphson techniques permit the largest time steps. A new technique, which is based on the fact that the dynamics of unstable iterated maps contain information about where the unstable root lies, is shown to improve substantially the performance of Picard iteration at a negligible computational cost.

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