Mantle Viscosity Derived From Geoid and Different Land Uplift Data in Greenland

Abstract

The Earth's mass redistribution due to deglaciation and recent ice sheet melting causes changes in the Earth's gravity field and vertical land motion in Greenland. The changes are because of ongoing mass redistribution and related elastic (on a short time scale) and viscoelastic (on time scales of a few thousands of years) responses. These signatures can be used to determine the mantle viscosity. In this study, we infer the mantle viscosity associated with the glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) and long-wavelength geoid beneath the Greenland lithosphere. The viscosity is determined based on a spatio-spectral analysis of the Earth's gravity field and the land uplift rate in order to find the GIA-related gravity field. We used different land uplift data, that is, the vertical land motions obtained by the Greenland Global Positioning System (GPS) Network (GNET), gravity recovery and climate experiment (GRACE) and glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) data, and also combined them using the Kalman filtering technique. Using different land uplift rates, one can obtain different GIA-related gravity fields. As shown in this study, the mantle viscosities of 1.9 × 1022 Pa s and 7.8 × 1021 Pa s for a depth of 200–700 km are obtained using ICE-6G (VM5a) model and the combined land uplift model, respectively, and the GIA-related gravity potential signal.