Geophysics
As the continents’ frozen burden dissipates, the ground deforms — not only in the immediate area, but also in far-flung locations.
The loss of melting ice from land masses such as Greenland and Antarctica is causing the planet’s crust to warp slightly, even in spots more than 1,000 kilometres from the ice loss.
Ice melt removes mass from Earth’s continents. Liberated from the overlying weight, land that was once covered by ice lifts up. This vertical response has been much studied, but Sophie Coulson at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and her colleagues wanted to analyse how the ground shifts horizontally. They gathered satellite data on ice loss from Greenland, Antarctica, mountain glaciers and ice caps, and combined them with a model of how Earth’s crust responds to changes in mass.
Between 2003 and 2018, ice melting from Greenland and from Arctic glaciers caused the ground to shift horizontally across much of the Northern Hemisphere, and by as much as 0.3 millimetres a year in much of Canada and the United States. In some areas, even far from the melting ice, the horizontal movement was greater than the vertical movement.
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