Imagine that a massive ice sheet covered Canada and oozed down over a large part of the northern United States, like icing spilling down the side of a cake.
Imagine that a massive ice sheet covered Canada and oozed down over a large part of the northern United States, like icing spilling down the side of a cake.
That was the situation, somewhere between 19,000 and 26,000 years ago. The ice sheet covered land all the way south to modern-day Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
It’s fascinating to picture, but the critical aspect to us today is what happened to the land when that ice sheet melted. And how does that affect modern-day sea-level rise and sinking land.
Ph.D. candidate Karen Williams embarked on computer modeling research to find out about the Earth’s changes after the ice melted. Working with her advisor, Associate Professor D. Sarah Stamps in the Department of Geosciences and collaborators Daniele Melini of the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia in Italy and Giorgio Spada of the Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia at the Università di Bologna, Italy, their results were recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
Read more at Virginia Tech
Image: Karen Williams (at left) and D. Sarah Stamps worked with Italian collaborators to assess the impact of the melting of the Laurentide ice sheet on present-day vertical land motions. (Credit: Photo by Spencer Coppage for Virginia Tech)
