We have just had a new paper (‘Non-linear motions of Australian geodetic stations induced by non-tidal ocean loading and the passage of tropical cyclones’) published in the journal of Journal of Geodesy – see here.
In this paper we examined movements in land around Australia using time-series from stations fitted with continuous GPS. Most people think the land is completely stable, but actually the land moves each day by a few millimetres for a variety of reasons. Here we show that land around parts of Australia sunk when cyclone Yasi crossed the Australian coast in January/February 2011. This cyclone generated a large storm surge and the extra weight of this large volume of water near the coast actually resulting in the land dropping slightly.
A earlier study (see here) showed the same thing happens around the North Sea coastlines when big storm surges happen there.
Professor Ivan Haigh 