Effects of Andrade and Burgers rheologies on glacial isostatic adjustment modeling in Antarctica

Abstract

Variations in ice mass deform the Earth and modify its gravity field, a process known as Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA). GIA in Antarctica remains poorly constrained due to the cumulative effect of past and present ice-mass changes, the unknown history of the past ice-mass change, and the uncertainties on the mechanical properties of the Earth. This paper investigates the effect of using Andrade and Burgers viscoelastic rheologies, rather than the commonly used Maxwell rheology, to model GIA-induced deformation in Antarctica. The Love number and Green's function formalism are used to compute the radial surface displacements and the gravity changes induced by the past and present ice-mass changes. We consider an Earth model whose elastic properties and radial structure are averaged from the Preliminary Reference Earth Model and two viscosity profiles to account for the recently published results on the present ice-mass changes. Using the three rheological laws affects the temporal response of the Earth differently, leading to smaller discrepancies than those induced by the two viscosity structures. The differences are the largest between Maxwell and Burgers rheologies during the 100–1000 years following the beginning of the surface-mass change. Results show that using the Andrade and Burgers rheologies allows the Earth to respond on decennial to centennial time scales, up to 10 m more than Maxwell. Considering only the recent ice-mass changes, the deformation rates derived from Burgers and Andrade rheologies are several times larger than those estimated by Maxwell rheology.

Keywords

• GIA
• Antarctica
• Modeling
• Rheology
• Displacement
• Viscosity