Glacio-seismotectonics: ice sheets, crustal deformation and seismicity

Abstract

The last decade has witnessed a significant growth in our understanding of the past and continuing effects of ice sheets and glaciers on contemporary crustal deformation and seismicity. This growth has been driven largely by the emergence of postglacial rebound models (PGM) constrained by new field observations that incorporate increasingly realistic rheological, mechanical, and glacial parameters. In this paper, we highlight some of these recent field-based investigations and new PGMs, and examine their implications for understanding crustal deformation and seismicity during glaciation and following deglaciation. The emerging glacial rebound models outlined in the paper support the view that both tectonic stresses and glacial rebound stresses are needed to explain the distribution and style of contemporary earthquake activity in former glaciated shields of eastern Canada and Fennoscandia. However, many of these models neglect important parameters, such as topography, lateral variations in lithospheric strength and tectonic strain built up during glaciation. In glaciated mountainous terrains, glacial erosion may directly modulate tectonic deformation by resetting the orogenic topography and thereby providing an additional compensatory uplift mechanism. Such effects are likely to be important both in tectonically active orogens and in the mountainous regions of glaciated shields. In general, the short-term response to ice fluctuations is similar to the Earth's response to fluctuations in water reservoirs with the subsequent increase or decrease in seismicity which depends on the pre-existing stress state. When the ice fluctuations occur on the spatial scale, and magnitude, of the Late Pleistocene glaciation and deglaciation, however, the viscoelastic response of the Earth (especially the mantle) causes significant changes in crustal deformation and earthquake activity that is spatially extensive and temporally complex. The regions of greatest ice thickness and the regions marginal to the Late Pleistocene ice sheets indicate the most dramatic evidence of earthquake faulting. The mantle response to these large ice mass fluctuations and the change in mass between the oceans and land caused, and continues to cause, measureable crustal deformation at hundreds of kilometres from the ice margins. For both tectonically active and cratonic regions, palaeoseismic investigations of Late Pleistocene and Holocene faults are an important tool in evaluating earthquake hazard. The predicted response of the Earth over this time, however, is very dependent on the model assumed. For most regions, far more carefully designed field observations are needed to constrain the existing rheological and ice models.