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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

...and growing smaller every day.

The ice shelves are getting smaller, but as the ice sheets melt, isostatic rebound should raise the land mass of Antarctica up, increasing the land area of Antarctica.

Except that some of Antarctica is below sea level. On the other hand, the reduction of gravitational pull from the melting ice will actually cause sea level drop around Antarctica ( which obviously makes it worse for Equatorial regions)

The effect is much much slower then the melting though. For example Finland, Sweden and Norway are still rising up from the last ice age (over 10k years ago). Don't know the other countries numbers but Finland is rising at 3 to 9mm (more as you go up north the gulf) per year from Gulf of Bothnia.

The land area of Finland grows by ~7km^2 every year because of this.

Fun fact in parts of Finland the land rising from the sea is projected to be faster then the current sea level rise scenarios due to climate change (not the worst ones but the "middle of road" scenarios that play out when we actually do something)

From what I understand, rebound is fairly rapid at first when the crust itself uncompresses. Then it slows down and gets exponentially slower as the exceedingly viscous mantle flows back into the region. I believe that's what's occurring under Finland today, but I'm not sure how fast it ever was at its peak.

:-(

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