Glacial Isostatic Adjustment and Contemporary Sea Level Rise: An Overview

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 c...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Surveys in geophysics 2017, Vol.38 (1), p.153-185
Main Author: Spada, Giorgio
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adjustment
Altimeters
Altimetry
Astronomy
Climate change
Cryosphere
Cryospheres
Earth and Environmental Science
Earth Sciences
Fingerprints
Gages
Gauges
Geophysics
Geophysics/Geodesy
Harmonic analysis
Ice
Marine
Observations and Techniques
Oceans
Rheology
Sea level
Sea level rise
Spatial analysis
Tides
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Summary: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.
ISSN:0169-3298
1573-0956
DOI:10.1007/s10712-016-9379-x