The speed of a reaction to a change in environment. See Dyke and Peltier (2000) Geomorph. 32, 1–4 on response times and sea-level changes. For land ice, the dynamic response time is proportional to the size of the ice mass (W. Paterson 1994). J. Bamber and A. Parsons (2004) have a table of estimated response times for various components of the climatic system.
See also reaction time; relaxation time.