Doctor Sophie Coulsen and her colleagues explained in a recent paper that, as glacial ice from Greenland, Antarctica and the Arctic Islands melts, Earth’s crust beneath these land masses warps, an impact that can be measured hundreds and perhaps thousands of miles away.
By analyzing satellite data on melt from 2003 to 2018 and studying changes in Earth’s crust, Coulsen and her team were able to measure the shifting of the crust horizontally. Their research found that in some places the crust was moving more horizontally than it was lifting. The research also provides a potentially new way to monitor modern ice mass changes.
These shifts have an impact on the continued melting. “In some parts of Antarctica, for example, the rebounding of the crust is changing the slope of the bedrock under the ice sheet, and that can affect the ice dynamics,” said Coulson.
The Arctic is an interesting region because, as well as the modern-day ice sheets, we also have a lasting signal from the last ice age,” explained Coulson. An ice sheet once covered what is now Northern Europe and Scandinavia during the Pleistocene Epoch, the ice age that started roughly 2.6 million years ago and lasted until about 11,000 years ago. “The Earth is actually still rebounding from that ice melting.”
“On recent timescales, we think of the Earth as an elastic structure, like a rubber band, whereas on timescales of thousands of years, the Earth acts more like a very slow-moving fluid.” said Coulson. “Ice age processes take a really, really long time to play out, and therefore we can still see the results of them today.”
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-polar-ice-shifting-earth-sea.html