Is global climate change responsible for what happened in Japan? In September of 2009 the Guardian reported that:
Scientists at a London conference next week will warn of earthquakes, avalanches and volcanic eruptions as the atmosphere heats up and geology is altered.
Why would melting ice caps cause earthquakes?
More after the fold...
When the polar ice caps melt, the weight that had been pressing steadily down on one particular area is redistributed across the whole ocean. It's rather like having a block of ice on one end of the teeter totter next to your toddler to balance her older brother, and suddenly the melting block slides off the side. You immediately know what happens next is not going to be good.
In 2006 University of Alberta geologist Patrick Wu said:
A cubic metre of ice weighs nearly a tonne and some glaciers are more than a kilometre thick. When the weight is removed through melting, the suppressed strains and stresses of the underlying rock come to life.
The Earth's crust is more sensitive than some might think. There are well-documented cases of dams causing earthquakes when the weight of the water behind a dam fills a reservoir.
Bill McGuire of the University College London's Hazard Research Center said:
"The added load of the water bends the crust, and that means that you tend to get tensional conditions in the upper part of the crust and compressional a bit lower down, just as if you bend a plank of wood or something,"
Although Burgmann wasn't too worried.
"It would take a long time to add up to a significant amount," Burgmann said—so while it's an area of research to keep an eye on, it's unlikely to have any disastrous consequences, at least for now.
But this was five years ago, before the acceleration of ice melt was realized.
Interestingly, in a story released one year ago on Friday entitled, “Prehistoric response to global warming informs human planning today” University at Buffalo anthropologist Ezra Zubrow said:
"With forecasts of sea-level rises and changing weather patterns, people today have been forewarned about some likely ramifications of climate change," Zubrow says, "but those living thousands of years ago, during the Holocene climatic optimum, could not have known what lay ahead of them and how their land -- and lives -- would be changing.
"This was a slower change," he says, "about one-third the rate we face today. In the Holocene period, it took a thousand years for the earth to warm as much as it has over the past 300 years -- roughly the time spanned since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution."
And that was before they found out that the heat from the deep oceans is accelerating melt of the Antarctic ice.
Now that the upwelling deep sea water is the clear cause of the melting ice shelf, rather than summer melt water, as had been thought in the past, it’s a question of how winds will change in a warming world and whether they will drive more warm water into the ice shelves.
This discussion was about WAIS thinning, the Western Antarctic ice sheet. It has recently been discovered that the WAIS is melting from underneath. What concerns me is, do they really know how much of the ice cap has melted away deep beneath the ocean surface? If it is melting away areas which aren't over land, we might not even be aware of how much the weight distribution has changed in the oceans. Sea level doesn't rise when submerged ice melts. If they didn't know until this year that the warm ocean currents were eating away at the West Antarctic ice shelf, obviously they don't know exactly what's going on down there.
I am not claiming to know what caused the earthquake in Japan. However, it's certainly something to consider. On the other hand, Dr. Daniel McNamara, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey said:
As for any claims that the earthquake somehow relates to climate change, McNamara didn’t hesitate to dismiss that connection. He explained that while evidence shows melting glaciers can cause small tremors directly underneath as their weight on the Earth’s crust reduces, what happened in Japan “is not connected in any way to that process.”
I don't claim to have any expertise in this area much less that which McNamara has. But I'm skeptical of someone that says in one breath that scientists don't know how to predict quakes and says in the next breath that he knows it doesn't have anything to do with climate change. How does he know? It was only in the last few years that they found out about the Alaskan quakes being caused by the glacier melt. He also said:
“The disaster left a gigantic rupture in the sea floor, 217-miles long and 50 miles wide. It also shifted Japan’s coast by eight feet in some parts, though McNamara was quick to explain much of the coast likely didn’t move as far.
McNamara found the way in which the quake actually sunk the elevation of the country’s terrain to be more troublesome than coastal shifting. “You see cities still underwater; the reason is subsidence,” he said. “The land actually dropped, so when the tsunami came in, it’s just staying.”
You see to me, it would make perfect sense for parts of the ocean floor to sink in response to additional water pressure while other areas are slowly rising due to reduced weight of the polar ice on the Earth's crust. That doesn't mean this is what happened, but I think it should be fairly investigated instead of dismissed out of hand. That's just how science works. You don't assume that you know the answer before you do the research. That prejudices your results.
The rush to deny that GCC had anything to do with the quake reminds me too much of NOAA saying that the Gulf Coast is fine after the oil spill and that all the dispersant just went away. Now we know a lot of it is sitting on the bottom of the ocean all tied up with the leaked oil. Or when the EPA said the air at Ground Zero was safe to breathe. If that were true, why did we have to pass a bill just last December to pay for the treatment of all the first responders? I certainly believe their illnesses are related to the 9/11 event. And then there was the denial of soldiers being subjected to any chemicals during the first Gulf War. And the claim that Agent Orange had no effect on the Vietnam veterans.We certainly know that wasn't true. In fact, last month they expanded benefits to Korean War veterans. And remember a few years back when NASA's chief climate scientist James Hansen said NASA was trying to silence him over his statements on global warming? I don't believe the mindset of these scientific administrators has completely changed in the last six months. I have become skeptical of my own government scientists anymore.
It is my hope that some independent body will take an in-depth look into the possibility that GCC and specifically melting polar ice caps may be contributing to the earth shifting around. I'm aware that tsunami's were much more active in the 60s. It doesn't preclude the possibility that we are contributing to these global events. I fear that, like many other issues, we will have to depend on Europe to investigate with open eyes. Unfortunately, it may not do any good. A study last year showed that the more dire the consequences the less likely a significant portion of the population of America is to believe that it's true.
Dire or emotionally charged warnings about the consequences of global warming can backfire if presented too negatively, making people less amenable to reducing their carbon footprint, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley.
Evidently, those that believe that the world is fundamentally fair refuse to believe they have any responsibility for global climate change. I would suspect, that the more affluent you are and comfortable your life is, the more likely you are to think that the world is fair.
However, there is some hope. A new study released by the University of Michigan just three days ago reveals that the efforts to change the way we talk about climate change by referring to it in the more accurate name of Global Climate Change versus Global Warming, are having an effect.
According to a University of Michigan study published in the forthcoming issue of Public Opinion Quarterly, more people believe in "climate change" than in "global warming."
And when the researchers analyzed responses to the survey by political orientation, they found that the different overall levels in belief were driven almost entirely by participants who identified themselves as Republicans. While 60 percent of Republicans reported that they thought climate change was real, for example, only 44 percent said they believed in the reality of global warming.
In contrast, about 86 percent of Democrats thought climate change was a serious problem, no matter what it was called.
So maybe we are making progress after all.