This is not off-topic, even though it is about my driveway again. We got 8 cm of wet snow on top of the ice that is still there (because breaking the ice has been like breaking steel). There is low friction between the ice and the snow. There is high cohesion within the snow. I was able to shovel the snow by just pushing across the driveway with a snow shovel. This produced a fold and thrust belt 2 m ahead of the shovel. This is called an acretionary wedge or critical wedge, which occur at the front of mountain belts, like the Himalaya, Bangladesh, and maybe southwest of Long Beach. A critical wedge has a balance between the dip of the basal thrust fault, the friction across that fault, and the topography (and cohesion must enter in somewhere?). If you jack up the internal part of the mountain belt (for example, the San Gabriel Mountains), you may drive the thrust front far offshore. If you erode the mountains and reduce the topography, the outer part of the thrust system can be abandoned and you get some out of sequence thrusting to jack up the internal mountains faster. Heartland daughter took some digital photos of our critical wedges, but the contrast of the snow does not show them well....we should have tossed a little food coloring on top....

(there is a famous paper from the 1950s where a couple of geologists (King Hubbert??) figured out you needed low friction to allow some thrust blocks (Wyoming?) to slide.)
Chris