The elastic response of the Earth to interannual variations in Antarctic precipitation

• Main Authors: Clinton P. Conrad, Bradford H. Hager
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 1995
• Subjects: Antarctic; The Antarctic; Antarc*
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.488.928; http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/GG/FACULTY/conrad/papers/Conrad_GRL1995.pdf

Abstract. Measurements of elastic displacements of the bed-rock surrounding large ice sheets have been proposed as a means to detect mass changes in these ice sheets. However, ac-cumulation of glacial mass on the ice sheets is a noisy process, subject to large spatial and temporal variations in precipita-tion. We simulated the response of the Antarctic continent o a stochastic model of interannual precipitation variations and found that interannual variations in the elastic response of the earth are large when compared to the long-term mean of dis-placements produced by an assumed average ice mass imbal-ance of 10%. If, as some scientists predict, Antarctic ice mass changes in the future become dramatic, the long-term signal should be large enough to be detected by a few years of geo-detic measurements, despite climatic noise.