Even weeks later, the world is still reeling at the devastation caused to Indonesia and the South Pacific by a series of deadly earthquakes and tsunamis that killed and injured hundreds.
The epicenter of the first 7.6 magnitude quake was located 30 miles off the coast of the island of Sumatra in Indonesia, and the second underwater 8.0 magnitude earthquake just below the ocean floor off American Samoa, produced a tsunami with waves as high as 15-to-20 feet in less than 25 minutes. The people living near the coastline never had a chance.
Ironically, less than a month earlier in September, a group of scientists researching the changing climate's effects on geological hazards met at the three-day conference on Climate Forcing of Geological and Geomorphological Hazards in London. The researchers predicted more frequent and violent earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, and tsunamis as global warming affects the earth's crust.
A link between climate change and shifts in the crust is not a new concept. Bill McGuire of University College London (UCL) who organized the meeting told Reuters, “The whole earth is an interactive system. You don't need huge changes to trigger responses from the crust.”
The scientists looked back at climate changes associated with the end of the last ice age and the retreat of glaciers, approximately 18,000 years ago. McGuire explained that when ice melts, the earth's crust “bounces” up again, triggering earthquakes that then set off landslides and tsunamis.
Simon Day of the University of Oxford and Serge Guillas of UCL demonstrated how subtle changes in sea level might have an impact on seismic activity. And Tony Song, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, pointed to recently discovered “glacial earthquakes” where glacial ice mass crashes down like a huge landslide.
In 2007, McGuire published an article in The Guardian, UK drawing a close correlation between rising sea levels and explosive activity at volcanoes. McGuire wrote that the enormous mass of water pouring into ocean basins from retreating ice sheets adds water to the continental islands and marine island chains, (such as Sumatra and Samoa), where more than 60 percent of the world's active volcanoes are located, is enough to overload and bend the underlying crust.
And according to an article written by Wade Norris for the Huffington Post after the Samoan tsunami, scientists are reporting that the Indonesian quake was so strong that it set off earthquakes in Alaska.
Researchers also noted that both in Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets and glaciers are melting as well as sliding. Robert Correll, chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, said the Greenland has seen a massive acceleration of the speed at which glaciers are sliding into the ocean, and each slide can cause an “ice” quake occurring several times a year.
Quakes range from six to 15 in the 1990s to 2002, and increased to 32 in the first 10 months of 2005, coinciding with an increase in Greenland's temperatures. This trend is causing all kinds of changes, including currents from the Pacific and Atlantic oceans feeding into the Arctic Circle and warming the waters even more.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that even if every country commits to global warming recommendations, that the earth's temperature will still rise by 6.3 degrees by 2010. Yet, according to Norris in the Huffington Post, scientists agree that to survive climate change, we need to limit the rise in temperature to two degrees. So, it's not a farfetched idea at all to assume that the deadly tsunami in the South Pacific had direct ties to the growing changes in our global climate.
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