Nye (1969a, 1970) and Kamb (1970) developed hard-bed sliding theories with a more

realistic
model of the bed than Weertman’s. The results are not fundamentally different; the
important
controlling parameters and their effects on sliding rate remain the same. The
improved realism,
however, makes possible a theoretical estimate of sliding rate from measured bed
topography.
The improved theories can also be used in models of other basal processes, such as
glacial
abrasion (Hallet 1979).
The Nye-Kamb theories consider an area A of the bed, large enough for its roughness
to
represent the bed as a whole, yet small enough for the sliding velocity over it to
be uniform. Such
an area may not exist in reality. The small-scale features of the bed are regarded
as roughness and
described statistically. A statistical description allows a calculation of sliding
velocity without
knowing the details of every bedrock bump and hollow.
Define as xy-plane the least-squares fit to the bed over the areaA, with x-axis in
the direction
of sliding. The z-coordinate points upward into the ice. Let ˜z(x, y) signify the
deviation of
the bed from the xy-plane. In the analysis, ˜z is decomposed into its spectral
components by
Fourier transform methods. The quantity

˜z2

= A−1
A ˜z2(x, y)dx dy is a measure of the
roughness of the bed over the area. However, the analysis finds that sliding
depends not so much
on

˜z2

but on the distributionof roughness a/λ over the wavelength spectrum; here a
denotes the
amplitude and λ the wavelength of a particular Fourier component.Much of the theory
assumes
white roughness; each segment of the bed, when referred to its mean as datum plane,
looks the
same at all magnifications and in all directions..