State-of-the-Science Review of the Stress Field during a Glacial Cycle and Glacially Induced Faulting

The amount of fault slip can be predicted from the model which dictates the magnitude of the induced earthquake and the stress release which determines the subsequent seismic history of the fault. [...] Due to the bending of the lithosphere, fibre stresses underneath the load are compressive at the deformed surface, but decrease to zero at the neutral plane and become extensional all the way down to the bottom of the lithosphere. [...] At the end of the ice age, when the glaciers retreated, the removal of the weight from the depressed land led to uplift or rebound of the land and the return flow of mantle material back under the deglaciated area. [...] The terms on the right side of the equation are the divergence of stress, the advection of pre-stress, the perturbed gravity field and the buoyancy force of local density perturbation, respectively. [...] 11 Since mass must be conserved during the deformation process, the second equation used in models of glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) is the linearized continuity equation: (2.4) This equation says that the perturbed density has two contributions: the change in volume of the parcel of mantle material as it moves (first term on the right side), and the change in the background density of the new.