Have you seen a topographic map of the Antarctic surface under the ice? It's pretty creepy: about half of it is below sea level. It's weird to think there's ice piled kilometers high on top of it. Of course, if/when all that ice melts, most of it would pop above (now higher) sea level, due to isostatic rebound.
Isostatic Rebound: I didn't know it existed! According to http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound , it could be in the order of magnitude of 1.8cm per year at some places of Antartica and Canada.
By eyeball, that’s 0.08 m over 2003–2011, or just about 1 cm/year. (Notice the tabs on the bottom: the x and y velocities also show clear trends. That’s continental drift. And when the news says something like “the earthquake permanently moved the ground almost two feet south”, the data comes from observatories like this one, among other methods.)
I hear you, because of course the continent of Antarctica straddles the South Pole, so it seems hard to establish what part of the continent is east of the remainder of the continent. But "east Antarctica" is a standard geographic term, at least in English,[1] and I frequently see the term in news reports about climate research in Antarctica. I see that the presence of the Transantarctic Mountains makes it feasible to distinguish different parts of the continent for a label like this.
[1] "East Antarctica, also called Greater Antarctica, constitutes the majority (two-thirds) of the Antarctic continent, lying on the Indian Ocean side of the Transantarctic Mountains."
my off-the-cuff personal rule for determining what would be "east" with respect to a pole would be to treat the GMT line as the "north" line. arbitrary but consistent and something you could orient with respect to.
those transantarctic mountains have very jagged peaks - is this a result of less wind exposure, and therefore less erosion? the article also mentions that the horizontal scale is different from the vertical scale, so it might just be that.
http://www.zonu.com/detail-en/2009-11-18-11159/Antarctica-to...