Can you say Subduction?
I saw a number of comments this morning wondering why there are more earthquakes happening. Puerto Rico seems to be the canary in the coal mine for this awareness (thanks, Denise), and I noticed that AKALib has a diary up on volcanos going more active than usual in the Philippines.
I got to thinking. Maybe climate change is only the beginning.
So, what if sea level rise and the loss of ice in Antarctica and Greenland are doing more than just playing merry hob with the weather? Remember that the Earth is essentially a thin skin of movable plates over a molten core. For several hundred thousand years, at least, pressures on various parts of those plates have been effectively stable. Now, though, two connected things are happening; the Antarctic continent is rising as the pressure of surface ice decreases, and oceans around the world are getting deeper. Every centimeter of water not only increases the risk to coastlines, but also puts increased pressure on the ocean bed.
Picture, if you will, the change in shape of a ball, between it being held by a hand lightly placed at its bottom, versus it being held by hands lightly placed over the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. With the movement of pressure, there will be changes in shape. And with changes in shape, there will be changes affecting the crustal plates. Pressure balances that have been more or less stable since the Antarctic ice sheets formed, aren’t any more.
So far, the only correlates I’ve found are those that say tectonic activity tends to raise the level of the ocean bed, increasing the rise in sea levels, but I think it may be more on an chicken and egg basis, that once the process starts, it cycles.
In any case, if this is correct, we would definitely not have a situation that can be reversed by not adding more CO2, we’d have one that needs CO2 mitigation as rapidly as it can be done. Even if we can get the ice caps back, the longer they’re gone, the larger both the initial deformation and the re-formation once the pressures redistribute again.
Now, when I come up with a “new” idea, it usually isn’t. All I can say for sure is that I haven’t come across it before. It may have its own journal, for all I know. So I’m asking the community if anyone knows whether any work has been done from this perspective, and where the links might be. Partially, I’m being lazy/efficient. I could keep searching for another two or three hours and get nothing, or perhaps come across the work in ten minutes. But given this community, if there is anything solid on this, my guess is that some commenter will not only have seen it, but have expert comments to make on it. So if that describes you, please add links to both the research and the researchers. Thanks.
Title change at 3:15 CDT — thanks to Grouchy Squirrel