What Lies Below at the South Pole | Hacker News Reader

What Lies Below at the South Pole

earthobservatory.nasa.gov

81 pointsmkempe15 comments

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...

Isostatic Rebound: I didn't know it existed! According to 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.

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

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.)

Something about "East Antarctica" confuses me.

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

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.

We have always been at war with Eastantarctica.

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

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.

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.

No Elder Things i hope...

Shoggoths

I was expecting Marvel's Savage Land http://marvel.com/universe/Savage_Land

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

http://www.wired.com/2012/12/antarctic-gothic-horror/all/

Transarctic mountains underneath..that's pretty dope

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