Earth 'Deforming' Faster as Ice Melts

The threat is looming large, at 400 km below the earth and you can clearly blame climate change for this.

The mantle below the earth's crust in Antarctica is flowing much faster than expected owing
to ice melting at a greater speed on the surface, research has shown. "Seeing this sort of deformation of the earth at such a rate is

unprecedented in Antarctica. What is particularly interesting here is that we can actually see the impact that glacier thinning is having on the rocks 400 km down," explained Peter Clarke, a professor of geophysical geodesy at Newcastle University.

At the surface, Antarctica appears to be a motionless and frozen landscape.

The new study explains for the first time why the upward motion of the earth's crust in the Northern Antarctic Peninsula is currently taking place so quickly.

The GPS data collected by an international research team has revealed that the land in this region is actually rising at a phenomenal rate of 15mm a year - much greater than can be accounted for by the present-day elastic response alone.