Isostatic Rebound: How Ice and Water Move Continents

He walks through a textbook example of isostatic rebound, the vertical movement of Earth's crust in response to loading and unloading. The weight can be water or ice. Out in the Lake Bonneville Basin, ancient shorelines are tilted because a thousand feet of water once pressed down on the land. When that water drained and evaporated, the crust rebounded upward, tilting the old waterlines toward the center where the lake had been deepest. The same principle applies to ice sheets. When the great glaciers melted, the land they had compressed, sometimes by as much as two thousand feet, began to rise again. It is a slow, powerful process, and the evidence is written directly into the landscape.