glacioisostasy
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
20
Scrabble Score
14
Letters
2
Syllables
9
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
The adjustment of the lithosphere due to the formation or melting of glaciers and ice sheets.
Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "It is assumed that glacioisostasy is the principal and virtually the only cause of oscillating movements of the earth's crust in regions with thick glaciers."
- "It is now widely accepted that phenomena like glacioisostasy and hydroisostasy have produced a vertical deformation of the earth's crust in virtually all coastal areas over the last 20 ka."
- "Thus it appears that relative sea-level changes that are both rapid and large scale can only be brought about by glacioisostasy and glacioeustasy, and, so far as we know, major build-ups of continental ice sheets that produced significant volumes of ice are confined to several relatively short periods of the Earth's history in the latest Precambrian, the Ordovician-Silurian, Carboniferous-Permian, and the mid-Cenozoic to the present day."
Etymology
From glacio- + isostasy.
Word Breakdown
- Prefix: glacio