Interactive comment on “ Strain heterogeneities at the ductile to brittle transition ; a case study on ice ” by Thomas Chauve et al

June 20th, We are thankful for very interesting and helpful comments provided by both reviewers. We hope that we were able to make the best use of these comments to improve our paper. In black are the reviewer comments, and the authors response appear in between. A new version of the paper is attached. Referee #1 In the work described in this MS, the authors investigate, using the method of Digital


Interactive comment
Printer-friendly version Discussion paper under creep deformation.As described in the authors' previous paper (Acta Materialia (2015)), application of the DIC method to ice provides a powerful tool to investigate evolution of strain fields during plastic deformation.In the present manuscript, very interesting results on behavior of local strain fields associated with cracking are presented, and the argument addressed are suitable for publication in Journal SE.However, I found some of the authors' explanations difficult to follow.The manuscript should be improved before acceptance for publication, with considering the following points: (1) (General comment) For convincing argument, focusing on the experimental results found in the present study, distinguish more clearly those from others already presented in the previous papers by the author(s) and other researchers.

RESPONSE
Thanks for this comment.We tried to make this distinction by highlighting the main useful results from our previous studies in the introduction, p. 2 lines 15-19.Grennerat et al. 2012 made the first measurements of strain field evolution in ice polycrystals.Chauve et al. 2015 showed the evolution of local strain field with dynamic recrystallization processes (nucleation and subgrain boundary formation).Sentences were added p11, lines 13-16.

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(2) Reconsider the description in 'Abstract'.The main purpose of the study must be to clarify 'the evolution of local strain fields around cracking' by the use of the DIC method as described in the top sentence in 'Abstract', but the description on the most important result obtained by the study is not clear.For example, if the argument is concluded by the last sentence 'A strong interaction between cracking and dynamic recrystallization is therefore evidenced', I wonder if it is a new finding.Such a general phenomenon may be already presented elsewhere.Consider carefully what is the most important finding made by the study.In addition, the title suggests 'strain heterogeneity' for the main topic of the paper but no descriptions about it in 'Abstract' and 'Concluding remarks'.

Interactive comment
Printer-friendly version Discussion paper RESPONSE Following your advices, the title was modified in "Strain field evolution at the ductile to brittle transition; a case study on ice."We also modified the abstract and put in the notion of heterogeneities, the link between changes in microstructures and stress redistribution.We left and modified the sentence rising the role of DRX as a way to relax the crack-tip stress field, since we didn't find any paper making such a direct relation.Although it might be specific to ice, we add "ice" into the sentence.Then, we tried to give more consistency between the conclusion and the abstract.

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(3) 'Introduction' should be more concise, with focusing on the main topic of the paper.RESPONSE OK, we have shortened it a bit putting the accent to the ice case.We left the description of ice deformation behavior, and on previous work characterizing strain heterogeneities and evolution, in order to show that these studies were only performed in the ductile regime.END (4) I found very interesting results are presented in section 3 'Strain field evolution ....'.It should be emphasized more clearly what is found in the present study, and describe it also in 'Concluding remarks'.

RESPONSE
It is not clear for us which of the interesting results were not highlighted in the concluding remarks.-we mentioned the fact that cracks appear at the side of deformation bands, where we can expect higher Schmid factor conditions -we mentioned that cracking modifies the deformation band pattern -we mentioned the co-existence between micro-cracking and dynamic recrystallization mechanisms, with DRX plasticity-