Glacial Isostatic Rebound: Crust Relaxation After Ice Loss

A continental ice sheet is heavy enough to bend the solid lithosphere and push the crust beneath it down by hundreds of meters — while a ring of crust just beyond the ice edge flexes upward into a peripheral "forebulge," exactly as an elastic plate loaded at its center would. This simulator solves the real axisymmetric thin-plate flexure equation numerically for an adjustable ice sheet, then lets you deglaciate it and watch the crust relax back toward equilibrium on a mantle-viscosity-controlled exponential timescale — the same glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) process still raising Scandinavia and Hudson Bay today, thousands of years after the ice disappeared.