Our skill in understanding and predicting the response of the Earth system to change is rooted in our ability to represent the processes that move air, water and energy and around the planet in a mathematical terms.  Most of the maths used by geophysicists is approximate and relatively simple, but in some areas it’s still required for them to roll up their sleeves and develop new numerical techniques.

Love numbers, first presented by A. E. H. Love in the early 1900s, are widely used in geophysics.  They provide a simple way of describing the complex deformation of a near-spherical object, like the Earth, in response to a redistribution of mass on the object. Love numbers are, for example, used to describe how the Earth’s surface is deformed by moving large masses of water away for the polar regions and towards the equator.

In this paper, Giorgio Spada uses Love numbers to show that models can be freed of this assumption, allowing more realistic material properties to be modelled.  This work is significant for ice2sea because future sea-level rise will not be equally distributed around the oceans; sea level rise along some coastlines will be more than the global average, and elsewhere it will be less.

This study leads the way for an improved understanding of how ice lost from glaciers and ice sheets will be distributed around the world’s oceans, and improves our confidence in identifying the most vulnerable coastlines.

Ice2sea Work Package:  W6.2

Publication: Spada, G. (2009), Generalized Maxwell Love numbers, Mathematical Physics.