Melting glaciers in North America 10,000 years ago may have given continental drift a bit of a push. Similar activity in Greenland now could eventually trigger volcanic eruptions in Iceland.
Geoscientists modeled a chain of events that demonstrate how sea level rise impacts plate tectonics, they report in the journal Nature.
“As ice volume was greatly reduced, it caused a huge motion in Earth’s crust,” Tao Yuan, a graduate student at Colorado University, Boulder, and an author of the paper, said in a press release. “Scientists knew that the ice melting caused the plates to uplift. But we show that they also moved a lot horizontally due to the ice melting.”
