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Note that this isn’t necessarily what the continent would look like if all the ice melts.

The lack of ice weight would allow the land to rebound upwards:

https://polarjournal.ch/en/2022/07/13/what-greenland-and-ant...




I mean it's what the content would look like for a long time, Scandinavia is still not done rising from the last glacial period.


Are there earthquakes or other events that are recognized on a human scale?


When my mom was a kid, the edge of my grandparent's lot used to have a rowboat tied very near it. Now the sea is about a block away.

The seismic tremors caused by the uplift are so minor that no layperson even knows about them.


Yes. The entire northern lattitudes have quakes (typically mag 1-3) from ongoing post-glaciation uplift.


Yes, small ones. http://www.snsn.se/map_right.html lists earthquakes in Sweden the last year.


Also Greenland and Antartica have so much ice it produces a gravitational pull on the surrounding water. Its one of the reasons sea levels rise in most of the world when that gravity weakens and water is redistributed.


This effect only has an impact on the surrounding sea level, it somewhat counterbalances the local sea level rise from the melting ice sheet. It has no impact ( likes tides) on global sea levels.


Do you have a link to an article explaining this?



The math is trivial to explain this (in theory).


I never heart that. My guess is that the difference is minimal. Do you have a source with a detailed calculation?



Let's do some back of the envelope calculation. Using data from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_ice_sheet

The volume of the Antarctic Ice Sheet is 26.5 million cubic kilometres. If you use the Spherical Cow Theorem and put all that ice into an sphere, the radius is 185km https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=sphere+of+26.5+million+... . The gravity caused by that sphere at the surface is 0.047m/s^2 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=gravity+of+24%2C380%2C0...

Compared to the usual acceleration of gravity that is almost 9.8m/s^2, it's only a 0.0048 = 0.48%. That is the slope of the real see compared to an ideal sea where there is no gravity from the ice. I'm using a spherical ice instead of a sheet of ice. With a sheet of ice the effect would be much smaller, but I'm too lazy to look up.

The gravity from the ice decrease as 1/r^2 when you go farther. We must integrate the slope to get the volume. I'm going to use a flat Earth, to simplify the calculation, but as the 1/r^2 reductions is quite fast, it's not a problem. With a curved Earth it will be more, but not too much.

Also, we must multiply by 2*pi*r to get the volume in the flat surface all around the sphere instead of the surface of a vertical cut of the sea.

The radios of the Earth is 6371km, so the "distance" to the north pole is 6371kmpi=20000km and we can cut the integral there https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Integral+from+185+to+20... The result is 48,000 km^3 of water. But melting the Antarctic Ice sheet will release 24,300,000 km^3 So it's only a .2% more.

In other units, melting all the Antarctic Ice would increase the sea level like 58m (190ft). The additional effect of the gravity is less than .3m (1ft) And I expect that a calculation if a sheet shaped ice will give a much smaller result.


The integral is wrong. Let's try again:

First, let's calculate the additional high. It's better to imagine the 0 is in the oposite pole, and the additional height is very similar to the old integral without the 2*pi*r https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Integral+from+x+to+2000... i.e. 0.0048 * 185^2 * (1/r - 1/20000)

Now we must integrate it again, with the 2*pi*r Integral from 185 to 20000 of (0.0048 * 185^2 * (1/r-1/20000)), that is only 606km^3, so 1/80 of my previous calculation. So, fixing the last part of my comment with the new numbers:

But melting the Antarctic Ice sheet will release 24,300,000 km^3 So it's only a .0025% more. In other units, melting all the Antarctic Ice would increase the sea level like 58m (190ft). The additional effect of the gravity is less than .0004m (4mm, 1/8 inch)


Thank you! I was wondering why it looked so different from any other landmass, with the land being so much "sparser".

The end of the 7-second animated video on your link shows a landmass that looks much more like the rest of the Earth.

Utterly fascinating to see a "hidden continent" like this -- I'm so used to unfamiliar maps being fantasy (like Westeros from Game of Thrones), so it's quite remarkable to see an unfamiliar map that is on our very planet.


Also, what is the relative sea level for this map - is it the same as the current one or what it will be like after the ice melts


if all the ice in antarctic melted (and nothing else happened), it would cause sea levels in antarctic to fall. That's because all the ice currently there exerts enough of a gravitation pull to increase sea levels there now. That being said there would be other things like the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and thermal expansion of the oceans that would be acting to increase the sea level.


We will see soon! (:




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