“Also, one could look for this signal in regional and larger-scale global navigation satellite system datasets to, in principle, produce improved constraints on the distribution of ice mass fluctuations and/or solid Earth structure.A Douglas C-124 Globemaster II, the same model plane that crashed into Mount Gannett in 1952, flies over San Francisco Bay. “Sophie’s work is important because it is the first to show that recent mass loss of ice sheets and glaciers causes 3D motion of the Earth’s surface that is greater in magnitude and spatial extent than previously identified,” he said. Glenn Antony Milne, professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Ottawa, explained that understanding the extent of this movement clarifies all studies of the planet’s crust. For example, to accurately observe tectonic motions and earthquake activity, we need to be able to separate out this motion generated by modern-day ice-mass loss,” she said.Ĭoulson is continuing her research as a Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico as part of a climate group that works on future projections of ice sheets and ocean dynamics. “Understanding all of the factors that cause movement of the crust is really important for a wide range of Earth science problems. The implications of this movement are far-reaching. “Ice age processes take a really, really long time to play out, and therefore we can still see the results of them today.” “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, explaining how these newer repercussions come to be overlaid on the older reverberations. “The Earth is actually still rebounding from that ice melting.” An ice sheet once covered what is now Northern Europe and Scandinavia during the Pleistocene Epoch, the ice age that started about 2.6 million years ago and lasted until roughly 11,000 years ago. “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,” Coulson explained. The current melting is only the most recent movement researchers are observing. “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, who worked in the lab of Jerry Mitrovica, the Frank B. These movements have an impact on the continued melting. If you pick it up, you’ll see the water moving vertically to fill that space.” When you push the board down, you would have the water beneath moving down. To understand how the ice melt affects what is beneath it, Coulson suggested imagining the system on a small scale: “Think of a wooden board floating on top of a tub of water. Sophie Coulson and colleagues analyzed satellite data on melting glaciers and its impact on the Earth’s crust. In addition to the surprising extent of its reach, the Nature brief pointed out, this research provides a potentially new way to monitor modern ice mass changes. Their research, which was highlighted in Nature, found that in some places the crust was moving more horizontally than it was lifting. “So they knew that it would define the region where the glaciers are, but they hadn’t realized that it was global in scale.”īy analyzing satellite data on melt from 2003 to 2018 and studying changes in Earth’s crust, Coulson and her colleagues were able to measure the shifting of the crust horizontally. “Scientists have done a lot of work directly beneath ice sheets and glaciers,” said Coulson, who did her work in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and received her doctorate in May from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Sophie Coulson and her colleagues explained in a recent paper in Geophysical Research Letters 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. The melting of polar ice is not only shifting the levels of our oceans, it is changing the planet Earth itself.
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