More Mega Earthquakes in a Climate Changed World Say Scientists

March 17th, 2011 by Susan Kraemer

Is this what climate change looks like?

There has been an increase in the numbers of earthquakes over 6.0, over the last few years. For the first half decade till 2006, there were about 13 earthquakes a year over 6.0 according to statistics at the USGS (13, 13, 13, 12, 13).

But in the last few years, the frequency of major earthquakes (over 6.0) increased to 20, 17, 21, 25, and in just the first 3 months of this year we already have had 7 large earthquakes.

After the Haiti earthquake in 2010, followed by one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded in Chile in January, at 7.1, followed by two averaging 6.7 in February, and also in February a 6.3 in February in New Zealand (in a part of the country not prone to earthquakes), now we have the 9.0 mega quake with a 7.2 aftershock in Japan, in March.

At last year’s American Geophysical Union meeting geologists were already questioning whether there was a climate change link underlying the increasing frequency of unusually large earthquakes, according to Mathew McDermott at Treehugger. The Haiti earthquake was then just the latest example.

In the case of regions like Haiti, the deforestation – caused by years of drought, caused by climate change – is rendering the earth’s crust more unstable, posited geologist Shimon Wdowinski at the meeting. Deforestation leads to erosion and mudslides – and Haiti is 98% deforested.

The 2010 disaster stemmed from a vertical slippage, not the horizontal movements that most of the region’s quakes entail, supporting the hypothesis that the movement was triggered by an imbalance created when eroded land mass was moved from the mountainous epicenter to the Leogane Delta.

Other evidence of a deforestation link comes from Taiwan, which also has experienced earthquakes after major storms in Mountain regions.

But other forces are at work as well. As early as 2009, scientists were beginning to develop a theory connecting climate change to earthquakes. (Japan’s Earthquake: The Climate Change Connection)

The theory is that melting glaciers, due to climate change, are now relieving weight on the crust, and beginning to shift the pressures on the earth, and that this could be behind the recent increase in major earthquake frequency. (Which has repercussions for glaciers too: 40 Million Tonne Iceberg Dumped in Lake by NZ Earthquake)

Susan Kraemer@Twitter

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Tags: earthquake

About the Author

Susan Kraemer writes at CleanTechnica, CSP-Today, PV-Insider , SmartGridUpdate, and GreenProphet. She has also been published at Ecoseed, NRDC OnEarth, MatterNetwork, Celsius, EnergyNow, and Scientific American. As a former serial entrepreneur in product design, Susan brings an innovator's perspective on inventing a carbon-constrained civilization: If necessity is the mother of invention, solving climate change is the mother of all necessities! As a lover of history and sci-fi, she enjoys chronicling the strange future we are creating in these interesting times. Follow Susan on Twitter @dotcommodity.

Anonymous

Thanks for the info & link
Ben

Rubbish. Also – i thought haiti’s deforestation was caused by people cutting down trees, not climate change. Isnt the Dominican republic heavily forested? Did climate change learn to respect international boundaries?
Neo

Everybody is gonna die … eventually
grehg

http://www.universetoday.com/14257/rising-temperatures-could-shut-down-plate-tectonics/

Make up your mind, first you say that the plates will stop, now they will go faster ??
- http://cleantechnica.com/author/susan Susan Kraemer
  
  I think you are getting your comments mixed up between sites. The blogger at Universe Today is elsewhere on the internets.
ThM

This is utter nonsense. Earthquakes are caused by the relative movements of tectonic plates and the enourmous constraints that are suddenly released. The influence of the factors you mention, if they exist, is so small, so infinitesimal, compared to the energy released in an earthquake, that it is totally impossible to measure. Stop talking about “consensus” and “developing consensus”, science is not a matter of consensus.
- Dave M
  
  Actually, ultimately, science IS about consensus. Among scientists.
  
  It certainly is an idea now coming under consideration by scientists, per for example the Montreal Gazette:
  
  “Scientists have discovered that the accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet over the last 10 years already is lifting the southeastern part of that island several millimetres every year.
  
  The surface of the Earth is elastic. A heavy load such as a glacier will cause it to sink, pushing aside the liquid rock underneath.
  
  The Greenland glacier is about three kilometres at its thickest and it is believed that its weight has depressed sections of the land under the glacier about one kilometre. In fact, the weight of the glacier is so great that significant portions of Greenland have been pushed well below sea level.
  
  “There is certainly some literature that talks about the increased occurrence of volcanic eruptions and the removing of load from the crust by deglaciation,” said Martin Sharp, a glaciologist at the University of Alberta. “It changes the stress load in the crust and maybe it opens up routes for lava to come to the surface.
  
  “It is conceivable that there would be some increase in earthquake activity during periods of rapid changes on the Earth’s crust.”
  
  Other scientists, however, believe that tectonic movements similar to the one that caused the Japanese quake are too deep in the Earth to be affected by the pressure releases caused by glacier melt.
  
  These scientists theorize, however, that glacier melts could cause shallower quakes.
  
  Andrew Hynes, a tectonics expert at McGill University, said the issue is not so much the load shift on the Earth’s crust, but rather the increased fluid pressure in the fault that lubricates the rock, allowing the plate to slide.
  
  “All earthquakes, except those produced by volcanic activity, are essentially the unsticking of faults,” he said.
  
  In other words, if you pump fluid into a fault, it can reduce the friction and allow the rock to slide”.
  
  http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/Could+global+warming+causing+recent+earthquakes/4445389/story.html#ixzz1GzHubHle
  - arthur
    
    Science has nothing to do with consensus, which is in the realm of politics. Scientific facts are establishec by experiment, not popularity.
    - http://cleantechnica.com/author/susan Susan Kraemer
      
      And when enough data or experiments replicate the findings, what do scientists do? They agree, it becomes their agreed position, which the IPCC represents for climate change, for example.
      
      It is not a consensus among Rush Limbaugh followers, but among scientists, because as the evidence piles up, the experiments have the same findings, then gradually more and more scientists stop trying to disprove something that so many others have not been able to disprove, and so it becomes the accepted science.
      
      In Galileo’s or Newton’s day there were far fewer scientists to replicate experiments, and form consensus, but you won’t find scientists still trying to disprove Newtons law of gravity: they share a consensus now, and have for centuries.
      
      Eventually scientific theories that cannot be disproved become the consensus among scientists.
  - Good luck with that Consensus thing….
    
    Dave M said:
    
    ‘Actually, ultimately, science IS about consensus. Among scientists. ‘
    
    Tell that to Galileo. Actually, tell that to all the consensus-shattering scientists throughout history. Without them, we’d still be worshipping the Sun-god as he passed by each day. We’d be desperately trying still, to unravel the secrets of phlogiston. We’d be burning ‘witches’, because the weather wasn’t perfect. The list goes on ad infinitum.
    
    Oh that’s right, we’re still doing that witch thing.
dipperdap

Wow!!! more made up science. Jules Verne would be proud.
Pingback: Global Climate Scam » More Mega Earthquakes in a Climate Changed World Say Scientists
David Becker, Ph.D.

This idea is just silly. There is utterly no causal effect between climate change and earthquakes that has been even remotely shown. To think such factors as indicated could effect tectonic plate dynamics does not even pass the smell test. And it should be noted that there has been no significant climate change for roughly 15 years (to paraphrase Phil Jones.) Spreading this nonsense is really irresponsible, in my opinion.

[Ed: This is incorrect. A bunch of paid talkers from the CATO Institute might say Phil Jones says, but Phil Jones does not say there has been no climate change for 15 years. He is a respected climate scientist who accepts facts.

You can check for yourself: all the breaking records in heat, floods, ice melts, sea temperatures, glacier melts, and so on are well covered as each new one is broken at a scientific site covering climate news: http://climatesignals.org/ ]
- http://cleantechnica.com/author/susan Susan Kraemer
  
  David, here is Phil Jones’s quote from February 2010 that is mangled by the disinformation circuit:
  
  BBC: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
  
  Phil Jones: Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
  
  BBC: How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?
  
  Phil Jones: I’m 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 – there’s evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.”
  
  The science is explained in full at
  http://www.skepticalscience.com/Phil-Jones-says-no-global-warming-since-1995.htm
Hephaestus

It is probably a combination of melting glaciers, draining underground aquifers, coal mining via mountain top removal, redistribution of mass via the removal of forests and the subsequent erosion, and the draining of oil from the ground. All of which reduce pressure on the crust of the earth to some extent. It is probably also not a localized phenomena either. Things done on one side of the planet probably affect plate stability half a world away.
- http://cleantechnica.com/author/susan Susan Kraemer
  
  That seems to be a developing consensus of sorts. We will see how the evidence eventually stacks up.
  
  But interesting in that ‘more earthquakes’ was not one of the original predicted consequences two or three decades ago, as were the other results like more floods, more droughts, melting ice caps, ecological destabilizing new pests (turned out to be the pine bark beetle, so far) that have come to happen as predicted.
  
  Wonder if there’ll be any more surprises? I’m betting there will be.
- John McDougall
  
  Hephaestus, you have to be joking. What you are proposing is just a grab-bag of statements, with no connection with the real world. No science, just wild hypothesis. No rathional tachnical person could take you seriously.
- That Summer thing
  
  Hephaestus said:
  
  ‘ It is probably a combination of melting glaciers, draining underground aquifers….’
  
  There’s also that summer thing that has been happening for a while now, where millions of tons of snow and ice begin melting about this time each year, significantly altering the weight of snow packs and glaciers around the world.
  
  Hmmmmm…..