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Glacial Isostatic Adjustment and Contemporary Sea Level Rise: An Overview

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Abstract

Glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) encompasses a suite of geophysical phenomena accompanying the waxing and waning of continental-scale ice sheets. These involve the solid Earth, the oceans and the cryosphere both on short (decade to century) and on long (millennia) timescales. In the framework of contemporary sea-level change, the role of GIA is particular. In fact, among the processes significantly contributing to contemporary sea-level change, GIA is the only one for which deformational, gravitational and rotational effects are simultaneously operating, and for which the rheology of the solid Earth is essential. Here, I review the basic elements of the GIA theory, emphasizing the connections with current sea-level changes observed by tide gauges and altimetry. This purpose is met discussing the nature of the “sea-level equation” (SLE), which represents the basis for modeling the sea-level variations of glacial isostatic origin, also giving access to a full set of geodetic variations associated with GIA. Here, the SLE is employed to characterize the remarkable geographical variability of the GIA-induced sea-level variations, which are often expressed in terms of “fingerprints”. Using harmonic analysis, the spatial variability of the GIA fingerprints is compared to that of other components of contemporary sea-level change. In closing, some attention is devoted to the importance of the “GIA corrections” in the context of modern sea-level observations, based on tide gauges or satellite altimeters.

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Notes

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound.

  2. http://www.atmosp.physics.utoronto.ca/~peltier/data.php.

  3. http://geodynamics.org/cig/software/selen/.

  4. http://rses.anu.edu.au/highlights/view.php?article=188.

  5. http://www.psmsl.org.

  6. http://www.aviso.oceanobs.com.

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Acknowledgments

This paper is an outcome of the ISSI Workshop “Integrative Study of Sea Level Budget”, held in Bern in February 2015. Two anonymous reviewers are acknowledged for their very constructive comments. I have greatly benefited from stimulating discussions on GIA and the SLE with students and colleagues during the POLENET/SERCE GIA training school held in Gibraltar Island (Ohio, USA) in September 2015. Daniele Melini is thanked for providing support with the numerical simulations. Gaia Galassi and Marco Olivieri are acknowledged for very insightful suggestions during the various stages of preparation of this manuscript. The  open-source  program  SELEN (a SEa Level EquatioN solver) is  available  from  the  Computational  Infrastructure  for  Geodynamics  (CIG), at the address http://geodynamics.org/cig/software/selen/), or from the author. All figures have been drawn using the Generic Mapping Tools of Wessel and Smith (1998). The PSMSL is acknowledged for making available the tide gauge data from the web page http://www.psmsl.org. This work is funded by a DiSPeA (Dipartimento di Scienze Pure e Applicate) research Grant (CUP H32I160000000005) and by Programma Nazionale di Ricerche in Antartide (PNRA 2013/B2.06, CUP D32I14000230005). I benefited from the warm and relaxing atmosphere of the Naturalistic Annex of the Museum of Bagnacavallo (RA), Italy, where the paper was drafted.

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  1. Dipartimento di Scienze Pure ed Applicate (DiSPeA), Università degli Studi di Urbino “Carlo Bo”, Urbino, Italy

    Giorgio Spada

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Spada, G. Glacial Isostatic Adjustment and Contemporary Sea Level Rise: An Overview. Surv Geophys 38, 153–185 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10712-016-9379-x

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