Dr Guy Paxman guy.j.paxman@durham.ac.uk
Assistant Professor
Dr Guy Paxman guy.j.paxman@durham.ac.uk
Assistant Professor
H.C.P. Lau
J. Austermann
B.K. Holtzman
C. Havlin
Contemporary crustal uplift and relative sea level change in Greenland is caused by the response of the solid Earth to ongoing and historical ice mass change. Glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) models, which seek to match patterns of land surface displacement and relative sea level change, typically employ a linear Maxwell viscoelastic model for the Earth’s mantle. In Greenland, however, upper mantle viscosities inferred from ice load changes and other geophysical phenomena occurring over a range of timescales vary by up to two orders of magnitude. Here, we use full-spectrum rheological models to examine the influence of transient deformation within the Greenland upper mantle, which may account for these differing viscosity estimates. We use observations of shear wave velocity combined with constitutive rheological models to self-consistently calculate mechanical properties including the apparent upper mantle viscosity and lithosphere thickness across a broad spectrum of frequencies. We find that the contribution of transient behaviour is most significant over loading timescales of 102–103 years, which corresponds to the timeframe of ice mass loss over recent centuries. Predicted apparent lithosphere thicknesses are also in good agreement with inferences made across seismic, GIA, and flexural timescales. Our results indicate that full-spectrum constitutive models that more fully capture broadband mantle relaxation provide a means of reconciling seemingly contradictory estimates of Greenland’s upper mantle viscosity and lithosphere thickness made from observations spanning a range of timescales.
Paxman, G., Lau, H., Austermann, J., Holtzman, B., & Havlin, C. (2023). Inference of the timescale-dependent apparent viscosity structure in the upper mantle beneath Greenland. AGU advances, 4(2), 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022av000751
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Feb 7, 2023 |
Online Publication Date | Feb 24, 2023 |
Publication Date | 2023 |
Deposit Date | Feb 10, 2023 |
Publicly Available Date | Apr 17, 2023 |
Journal | AGU Advances |
Electronic ISSN | 2576-604X |
Publisher | Wiley |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 4 |
Issue | 2 |
Pages | 1-22 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1029/2022av000751 |
Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1183220 |
Published Journal Article
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Copyright Statement
© 2023. The Authors.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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