Glacial rebound and sea‐level change in the British Isles

ABSTRACT Observations of sea levels around the coastline of the British Isles for the past 10,000–15,000 years exhibit a major regional variation and provide an important data base for testing models of glacial rebound as well as models of the Late Devensian ice sheet. A high‐resolution rebound model has been developed which is consistent with both the spatial and temporal patterns of sea‐level change and which demonstrates that the observations are the result of (i) the glacio‐isostatic crustal rebound in response to the unloading of the ice sheet over Britain and, to a lesser degree, of the ice sheet over Fennoscandia, and (ii) the rise in sea‐level from the melting Late Pleistocene ice sheets, including the response of the crust to the water loading (the hydro‐isostatic effect). The agreement between model and observations is such that there is no need to invoke vertical crustal movements for Great Britain and Ireland of other than glacio‐hydro‐isostatic origin. The rebound contributions are important throughout the region and nowhere is it sufficiently small for the sea‐level change to approximate the eustatic sea‐level rise. The observational data distribution around the periphery as well as from sites near the centre of the former ice sheet is sufficient to permit constraints to be established on both earth model parameters specifying the mantle viscosity and lithospheric thickness and the extent and volume of the ice sheet at the time of the last glaciation. Preliminary solutions are presented which indicate an upper mantle viscosity of (3–5)1020 Pas, a lithospheric thickness of about 100 km or less, and an ice model that was not confluent with the Scandinavian ice sheet during the last glaciation and whose maximum thickness over Scotland is unlikely to have exceeded about 1500 m.