
What Lies Below at the South Pole - mkempe
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=84947
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theandrewbailey
Have you seen a topographic map of the Antarctic surface under the ice? It's
pretty creepy: about half of it is below sea level. It's weird to think
there's ice piled kilometers high on top of it. Of course, if/when all that
ice melts, most of it would pop above (now higher) sea level, due to isostatic
rebound.

[http://www.zonu.com/detail-en/2009-11-18-11159/Antarctica-
to...](http://www.zonu.com/detail-en/2009-11-18-11159/Antarctica-topography-
and-bathymetry-2008.html)

~~~
aragot
Isostatic Rebound: I didn't know it existed! According to
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-
glacial_rebound](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound) , it
could be in the order of magnitude of 1.8cm per year at some places of
Antartica and Canada.

~~~
celoyd
_it could be in the order of magnitude of 1.8cm per year at some places of
Antartica and Canada._

Here’s a visualization of elevation over time recorded by a GPS observatory at
Baker Lake, Nunavut, relatively near the fastest modeled rebound in Canada:
[http://www.sonel.org/spip.php?page=gps&idStation=2407](http://www.sonel.org/spip.php?page=gps&idStation=2407)

By eyeball, that’s 0.08 m over 2003–2011, or just about 1 cm/year. (Notice the
tabs on the bottom: the x and y velocities also show clear trends. That’s
continental drift. And when the news says something like “the earthquake
permanently moved the ground almost two feet south”, the data comes from
observatories like this one, among other methods.)

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pavel_lishin
Something about "East Antarctica" confuses me.

~~~
tokenadult
_Something about "East Antarctica" confuses me._

I hear you, because of course the continent of Antarctica straddles the South
Pole, so it seems hard to establish what part of the continent is east of the
remainder of the continent. But "east Antarctica" is a standard geographic
term, at least in English,[1] and I frequently see the term in news reports
about climate research in Antarctica. I see that the presence of the
Transantarctic Mountains makes it feasible to distinguish different parts of
the continent for a label like this.

[1] "East Antarctica, also called Greater Antarctica, constitutes the majority
(two-thirds) of the Antarctic continent, lying on the Indian Ocean side of the
Transantarctic Mountains."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Antarctica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Antarctica)

~~~
mkramlich
my off-the-cuff personal rule for determining what would be "east" with
respect to a pole would be to treat the GMT line as the "north" line.
arbitrary but consistent and something you could orient with respect to.

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nitrogen
This link is worth visiting for the cross section image alone.

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glxybstr
those transantarctic mountains have very jagged peaks - is this a result of
less wind exposure, and therefore less erosion? the article also mentions that
the horizontal scale is different from the vertical scale, so it might just be
that.

~~~
zrail
The scale is _extremely_ compressed on the horizontal. If they were scaled the
same, the image would be about 150 times wider than it is.

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digi_owl
No Elder Things i hope...

~~~
jhallenworld
They must be using Professor Pabodie's special drill...

[http://www.wired.com/2012/12/antarctic-gothic-
horror/all/](http://www.wired.com/2012/12/antarctic-gothic-horror/all/)

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kyu
Transarctic mountains underneath..that's pretty dope

