VIVA – The melting of the polar ice caps has turned it crooked crust. This shapeshifting occurred hundreds of miles away from icing. The shift as part of research to understand how climate change will affect sea level.
It’s important to understand how the Earth’s crust bends because scientists need to be able to correct for ground motion when measuring other geological processes.
When the ice melts and disappears, the crust underneath will change. The polar regions will lose ice at an increasing rate due to climate change.
Between 2000 and 2010, ice loss from Antarctica, Greenland and mountain glaciers increased by 60 percent compared to ice loss between 1990 and 2000, as quoted from the website. Livescience, Thursday, September 30, 2021.
This melting affected the shape of the Earth’s crust much like the loss of ice at the close of the Ice Age. Most research focuses on changes in the crust that exists just below and around the ice sheet.
In fact, when the researchers studied the effect further they focused on vertical changes in the shape of the crust. The movement of the Earth’s crust after the loss of ice is known to be three-dimensional, which means that it also shifts horizontally.
Scientist Sophie Coulson used satellite data collected between 2003 and 2018 to look for small movements in the Earth’s crust, then compared those changes to the loss of ice in Antarctica, Greenland, and high -latitude glaciers from year to year.
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