icepack: a new glacier flow modeling package in Python

Here we'll describe our work on an open-source software package for simulating the flow of ice sheets and glaciers called icepack. The main goals for icepack are to lower the barrier to entry to using sophisticated flow models for glaciologists who are not experts in scientific computing as such. Icepack is written in Python and built on the finite element modeling package Firedrake. This package provides an embedded domain-specific language for describing partial differential equations, which makes it easier to understand and modify the model physics for glaciologists than if the kernels had been hand-coded.