An earthquake fault that is ready to go is like a coiled spring – all that is needed is the pressure of a handshake… Bill McGuire, Emeritus Professor of Earth Sciences at UCL Earth Sciences — Volcanology, volcanic risk, volcanic hazards, volcano instability, climate change, geophysical hazards, natural disasters.
In 2016, Volcanologist and Climate expert Bill McGuire wrote an article published in The Guardian on how geophysical processes will be expected as climate change disrupts the atmosphere and hydrological cycles across the Earth. McGuire's lede warns that global warming may not only be causing more destructive hurricanes but also shaking the ground beneath our feet.
Climate change will soon be apocalyptic if the physics of the crisis continues to be understated, underreported, ignored, and used as a political club against the very people, warning of the fury unleashed as the Doomsday clock ticks away at 90 seconds before midnight. Daily Kos activist and blogger Meteor Blades wrote on the grim warning from The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, not only discussion of climate impacts but also Ukraine, where Putin rattles the drums of nuclear war.
We deserve to know how bad the crisis will be because we can't react or adapt to some of these catastrophic disasters' devastation in time. Suppose people are in denial or unaware of how our collective lives may not survive this crisis brought about by anthropogenic global warming. People need to education so we can finally act on the magnitude of the crisis; bandaids will not help us.
The coverage needs to be twenty-four hours daily, which would call for an international response to the Thwaites Glacier break-up. I would guess only a few thousand know how earthshaking the situation is. The melting below the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is partially a result of Geothermal sources. Coincidence? Let's call a planetary conference on abrupt sea level rise. I'm not holding my breath.
The atmosphere is far from isolated and interacts with other elements of the so-called “Earth system”, such as the oceans, ice caps and even the ground beneath our feet, in complex and often unexpected ways capable of making our world more dangerous. We are pretty familiar with the idea that the oceans swell as a consequence of the plunging atmospheric pressure at the heart of powerful storms, building surges driven onshore by high winds that can be massively destructive. Similarly, it does not stretch the imagination to appreciate that a warmer atmosphere promotes greater melting of the polar ice caps, thereby raising sea levels and increasing the risk of coastal flooding. But, more extraordinarily, the thin layer of gases that hosts the weather and fosters global warming really does interact with the solid Earth – the so-called geosphere — in such a way as to make climate change an even bigger threat.
McGuire shared a report from Chi-Ching Liu of the Institute of Earth Sciences at Taipei's Academia Sinica, where they found typhoons that smashed into Taiwan and the timing of small earthquakes under the island. He writes that "their take on the connection is that the reduced atmospheric pressure that characterises these powerful Pacific equivalents of hurricanes is sufficient to allow eaEarthake faults deep within the crust to move more easily and release accumulated strain."
The University of Miami found that heavy rainfall from tropical systems, which leads to extreme flooding, leads to powerful earthquakes such as the quake that killed over 360,000 people in Haiti. McGuire writes, "It is possible that floodwaters are lubricating fault planes, but Wdowinski has another explanation. He thinks that the erosion of landslides caused by the torrential rains acts to reduce the weight on any fault below, allowing it to move more easily."
Hurricanes Hannah, Ike, Gustave, and Fay crossed over Hispaniola in 2008. The horrifying earthquake occurred in January 2010, shortly after heavy flooding inundated Port-Au-Prince and surrounding areas in October 2009.
The Himalayas experiencing this phenomenon are attributable to rainfall disruption as well.
If today’s weather can bring forth earthquakes and magma from the Earth’s crust, it doesn’t take much to imagine how the solid Earth is likely to respond to the large-scale environmental adjustments that accompany rapid climate change. In fact, we don’t have to imagine at all. The last time our world experienced serious warming was at the end of the last ice age when, between about 20,000 and 10,000 years ago, temperatures rose by six degrees centigrade, melting the great continental ice sheets and pushing up sea levels by more than 120m.
These huge changes triggered geological mayhem. As the kilometres-thick Scandinavian ice sheet vanished, the faults beneath released the accumulated strain of tens of millennia, spawning massive magnitude eight earthquakes. Quakes of this scale are taken for granted today around the Pacific Ocean’s “Ring of Fire”, but they are completely out of place in Santa’s Lapland. Across the Norwegian Sea, in Iceland, the volcanoes long buried beneath a kilometre of ice were also rejuvenated as the suffocating ice load melted away, prompting a “volcano storm” about 12,000 years ago that saw the level of activity increase by up to 50 times.
Now, global average temperatures are shooting up again and are already more than one degree centigrade higher than during preindustrial times. It should come as no surprise that the solid Earth is starting to respond once more. In southern Alaska, which has in places lost a vertical kilometre of ice cover, the reduced load on the crust is already increasing the level of seismic activity. In high mountain ranges across the world from the Caucasus in the north to New Zealand’s southern Alps, longer and more intense heatwaves are melting the ice and thawing the permafrost that keeps mountain faces intact, leading to a rise in major landslides.
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Looking ahead, one of the key places to watch will be Greenland, where recent findings by a research team led by Shfaqat Khan of Denmark’s Technical University reveal a staggering loss of 272bn tonnes of ice a year over the last decade. GPS measurements show that, like Scandinavia at the end of the last ice age, Greenland and the whole of the surrounding region is already rising in response to the removal of this ice load. Andrea Hampel of the University of Hannover’s Geological Institute, who with colleagues has been studying this behaviour, is concerned that “future ice loss may trigger earthquakes of intermediate to large magnitude if the crust underneath the modern ice cap contains faults prone to failure”.
More earthquakes in Greenland might not seem like a big deal, but this could have far wider ramifications. About 8,200 years ago, an earthquake linked to the uplift of Scandinavia, triggered the Storegga Slide; a gigantic undersea sediment slide that sent a tsunami racing across the North Atlantic. Run-up heights were more than 20m in the Shetlands and six metres along the east coast of Scotland, and the event has been blamed for the flooding of Doggerland; the inhabited Mesolithic landmass that occupied what is now the southern North Sea.
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The bottom line in all of this is that as climate change tightens its grip, we should certainly contemplate more and bigger Hurricane Matthews. However, when it comes to the manifold hazardous by-blows of an overheating planet, and especially those involving the ground we stand on, we must also be prepared to expect the unexpected.
Over the decades, I have warned in many of my diaries that climate change is a threat multiplier amplifying natural disasters and wreaking havoc on the atmosphere, oceans, ice, and land. I'm not making any of this up; the CIA and the United Nations have emphasized the point repeatedly.
We deserve to know how bad the crisis will be because we can't react or adapt to some of these catastrophic disasters' devastation in time. Suppose people are in denial or unaware of how our collective lives may not survive this crisis brought about by anthropogenic global warming. They need to be educated on the scientific reality so we can finally act on the magnitude of the crisis; bandaids will not help us. The coverage needs to be twenty-four hours a day, and it would, for example, if international news outlets scream across headlines over no emergency response to the Thwaites Glacier break-up unfolding in the Amundsen Sea, Antarctica. I would guess only a few thousand know how earthshaking the situation is.
A 9.1 magnitude under-the-sea earthquake in Japan.