The Elastic Response of the Earth to Interannual Variations in Antarctic Precipitation

• Main Authors: Hager, Bradford H., Conrad, Clinton P.
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: unknown
• Published: 1995
• Subjects: Meteorology and Climatology; Antarctic; The Antarctic; Antarc*
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2060/19970023025

Measurements of elastic displacements of the bedrock surrounding large ice sheets have been proposed as a means to detect mass changes in these ice sheets. However, accumulation of glacial mass on the ice sheets is a noisy process, subject to large spatial and temporal variations in precipitation. We simulated the response of the Antarctic continent to 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 displacements produced by an assumed average ice mass imbalance 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 geodetic measurements, despite climatic noise.