Deglacial land emergence and lateral upper-mantle heterogeneity in the Svalbard Archipelago-I. First results for simple load models

• Main Authors: Doris Breuer, Detlef Wolf
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Key words; asthenosphere viscosity; Barents Sea; glacial isostasy; lateral heteroge- neity; lithosphere thickness. Maxwell viscoelasticity; Svalbard Archipelago; Svalbard
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.1032.6005; http://gji.oxfordjournals.org/content/121/3/775.full.pdf

The glacial-isostatic adjustment following the removal of the Pleistocene ice sheets furnishes basic information on the thickness of the Earth’s lithosphere and the viscosity of the subjacent mantle. Paper I is concerned with an elementary interpretation of the post-glacial land emergence observed at a restricted set of six locations in the Svalbard Archipelago. The interpretation is based on a three-layer, incompressible Maxwell-viscoelastic earth model, which is forced by a time-dependent load distribution simulating the deglaciation history of the Svalbard Archipelago and the Barents Sea. In view of inconclusive geomorphological evidence suggesting either totul or partial glaciation of the area at glacial maximum. two simple load models, BARENTS-TI and BARENTS-PI, are considered in the first instance. A comparison between the calculated and observed values of land emergence suggests increases in lithosphere thickness and asthenosphere viscosity with increas-ing distance of the location from the continental margin. The trends are qualitatively insensitive to the load model, load thickness or load cross-section used. For load