It’s what you wished for!
Scientists Echo More Hazards of Global Warming You Probably Didn’t Know Existed, or Cared Much
More of the human enhanced geological hazard are being spelled out as scientists scratch hard, going beyond textbooks.
Global Climate Change will trigger violent geological activity, but little is known about the effects. Larger, deadlier quakes? “Orchestral” volcanic eruptions? Giant glacial slides/ landslides? More frequent Jumbo tsunamis? Methane Burps?
Those are just a few of the items on the menu, which you have already ordered, and will have to pay for.
Sit tight and see how you fare on the deadly white-knuckle ride as global warming changes the earth’s crust. No need to fasten your seat belt because it won’t help.
“WHOI glaciologist Sarah Das stands in front of a block of ice that was raised up 6 meters by the sudden drainage of a meltwater lake in Greenland. (Photo by Ian Joughin, UW Polar Science Center)” Image may be subject to copyright.
Global warming may cause more deadly quakes and tsunamis
“Climate change doesn’t just affect the atmosphere and the oceans but the earth’s crust as well. The whole earth is an interactive system,” Professor Bill McGuire of University College London was reported as saying, at the first major conference on the changing climate’s effects on geological hazards.
“In the political community people are almost completely unaware of any geological aspects to climate change.”
“When the ice is lost, the earth’s crust bounces back up again and that triggers earthquakes, which trigger submarine landslides, which cause tsunamis,” said McGuire.
According to the Toba catastrophe theory a supervolcanic event at Lake Toba ( Sumatra, Indonesia) plunged the Earth into a mini-ice-age lasting several thousand years (70,000 to 75,000 years ago). The explosion, classified as “mega-colossal,” ejected about 2,800 km³ of volcanic matter into the atmosphere, the impact of which reduced the world’s human population to about 10,000, possibly a mere 1,000 breeding pairs, creating a bottleneck in human evolution. [The theory was proposed in 1998 by Stanley H. Ambrose of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.]
In more recent times, about 3,600 years ago, the Minoan eruption of Thera (Santorini), a major catastrophic volcanic eruption (VEI = 7, DRE = 60 km3), which was the second largest volcanic events on Earth in recorded history, destroyed most of the island of Thera, and contributed to the collapse of the Minoan culture. It also caused significant climatic changes in much of the Northern Hemisphere, for example, failure of crops in China.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory researcher Tony Song has warned about the enormous power of “glacial earthquakes.” Millions of tons of glacial ice, cracked by hydrofractures caused by the lubricating effect of the meltwater from supraglacial lakes, slide downward from great heights (in West Antarctic the ice sheet is about a mile high) like massive landslides.
“Our experiments show that glacial earthquakes can generate far more powerful tsunamis than undersea earthquakes with similar magnitude,” said Song.
“Several high-latitude regions, such as Chile, New Zealand and Canadian Newfoundland are particularly at risk.” [Having discovered an additional dozen or so nasty surprises, FEWW issued a travel warning to would be visitors to New Zealand months ago!]
Although ice sheets are disintegrating much more rapidly than previously thought, he noted, glacial earthquake tsunamis were “low-probability but high-risk.” [For now, anyway, but the odds are rapidly changing for the worst.]
Volcanoes can spew vast amounts of ash, sulphur, carbon dioxide and water into the upper atmosphere, reflecting sunlight and sometimes cooling the earth for a couple of years. But too many eruptions, too close together, may have the opposite effect and quicken global warming, said U.S. vulcanologist Peter Ward.
“Prior to man, the most abrupt climate change was initiated by volcanoes, but now man has taken over. Understanding why and how volcanoes did it will help man figure out what to do,” said Ward.
Speakers were careful to point out that many findings still amounted only to hypotheses, but said evidence appeared to be mounting that the world could be in for shocks on a vast scale.
McGuire says man-made CO2 emissions must be stabilized within about the next five years, to avoid a nightmare of which geological hazards are only a small part. What he didn’t say is where he got his 5-year “grace period” from because the tipping point was reached about 3 years ago, according to FEWW “EarthModel.”
“Added to all the rest of the mayhem and chaos, these things would just be the icing on the cake,” he said. “Things would be so bad that the odd tsunami or eruption won’t make much difference.”
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