The elastic response of the Earth to interannual variations in Antarctic precipitation

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Abstract
Measurements of elastic displacements of the bedrock surrounding large ice sheets have been proposed as a means to detect mass changes in these ice sheets. However, accumulation of glacial mass on the ice sheets is a noisy process, subject to large spatial and temporal variations in precipitation. We simulated the response of the Antarctic continent to a stochastic model of interannual precipitation variations and found that interannual variations in the elastic response of the earth are large when compared to the long‐term mean of displacements produced by an assumed average ice mass imbalance of 10%. If, as some scientists predict, Antarctic ice mass changes in the future become dramatic, the long‐term signal should be large enough to be detected by a few years of geodetic measurements, despite climatic noise.