Tectonic processes and the “ghosts” of past ice sheets are contorting, lifting and pulling Greenland in different directions, new research reveals.

Greenland sits on the North American tectonic plate, which has dragged the island northwest by 0.9 inches (23 millimeters) per year over the past two decades. Researchers have been monitoring this drift for some time, but a new study analyzing satellite data has found that there is far more to the movement and to other deformations than just plate tectonics.

“We get this complicated pattern with twisting, pressure, and tension,” said study lead author Danjal Longfors Berg, a postdoctoral researcher specializing in geodesy and Earth observation at the Technical University of Denmark. “The Greenlandic map will slowly lose its accuracy if not updated,” he told Live Science in an email.

Berg and his colleagues analyzed data from 58 Global Network Satellite System (GNSS) stations in Greenland that record the island’s horizontal and vertical movements, and nearly 2,900 GNSS stations around the North American plate. The researchers entered these data into a model, and when they removed the effect on Greenland of the North American plate, the researchers were left with bedrock deformations — areas where Earth’s crust has been stretched or crumpled — that didn’t match previous modeling.

In most regions, the movement of landmasses is overwhelmingly controlled by tectonic processes. But Greenland is different, because the island is covered by a giant ice sheet and has a tumultuous glacial past, according to the study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth.

Ice sheets pile enormous weight onto Earth’s crust, pressing it down into the mantle — the layer of the planet that sits beneath the crust. The material displaced in the mantle by the sinking crust is pushed out to the sides, creating what is known as a peripheral forebulge, Berg said. When an ice sheet retreats, the mantle does not return to its original shape immediately. Due to the mantle’s gooey consistency, it takes thousands of years for material to flow back into the dent created by the loaded crust. In other words, the mantle “has a very long memory,” Berg said.