At the end of October a truly malicious person whose name

will not be mentioned courtesy a sizable bribe involving chocolates,

pointed out that ice was merely very cold water, and that pack ice

could be thought of a collection of very flexible floating shock

absorbers. He asked if anyone had ever explored what happens if a tsunami crashes into pack ice or sheet ice en route to shore. For the most part, the question is somewhat academic as the correlation between pack ice and populations of people is close to  -1. There are other problems - pack ice tends to form in high latitudes near the poles where geostationary satellite coverage is not the best. How much pack ice there is (and where and for how long) has not been aggressively studied until recently. There's not a lot of paleo-tsunami research that goes on anywhere near either pole. Even when very small waves from the Fukushima incident hit Antarctica what interested everyone was that the water got there at all. Of course, when faced with new hurdles for the Navier-Stokes equations, we turn first to an illustrative chess game.