Mysterious Seismic Event That Shook the Earth for 9 days Caused by Greenland Tsunami
A landslide in a fjord led to a 650-foot tsunami.
A massive landslide in a Greenland fjord, caused by melting ice, triggered a surprising seismic event last year that shook the earth for nine days.
According to a report recently published in the scientific journal Science, tremors that were registered in September 2023 originated from the massive wave rocking back and forth in the Dickson fjord in Greenland’s remote east.
“The completely unique thing about this event is how long the seismic signal lasted and how constant the frequency was,” one of the authors of the report, Kristian Svennevig, from the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, told AFP.
“Other landslides and tsunamis have produced seismic signals but only for a couple of hours and very locally. This one was observed globally all the way to the Antarctic,” he said.
The research team recently published their findings today in the journal Science. The landslide and the tsunami triggered unusual seismic activity that led to the investigation into its origins.
When seismic monitoring networks first detected the activity, scientists were perplexed for two reasons.
First, the signal was much more spread out than the typical tight squiggles that an earthquake produces on a seismograph – a device used to record ground shaking.
‘It oscillated with a 92-second-interval between its peaks, too slow for humans to perceive,’ according to a statement from the University of California San Diego, one of the institutions that contributed to the research.
Second, the signal remained strong for nine straight days. Typical seismic events decay much more rapidly – the average earthquake lasts only seconds to minutes.
Scientists around the world quickly began working to get to the bottom of this strange signal.
The readings that triggered the scientific interest were related to a phenomenon called a “seich.” This term refers to the rhythmic movement of a wave in an enclosed space (like water splashing backward and forwards in a bathtub or cup).
Immediately after the tsunami, the seiche was going up 7 metres on either side of the fjord. Within days, it had gone down to a few centimetres – so small that a Danish naval boat that went up the fjord three days after the landslide didn’t notice it.
But the seiche just kept going, and it probably persisted long after the nine days, when it was no longer detectable by distant seismic stations, says Hicks. “No one has ever reported seiches lasting for so long, or dissipating their energy so slowly.”
Alarmists tie this development to a climate crisis:
What happened is called a “cascading hazard,” Svennevig said, and it all started with human-caused climate change.
For years, the glacier at the base of a huge mountain towering nearly 4,000 feet above Dickson Fjord had been melting, as many glaciers are in the rapidly warming Arctic.
As the glacier thinned, the mountain became increasingly unstable before it eventually collapsed on September 16 last year, sending enough rock and debris tumbling into the water to fill 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
The subsequent mega-tsunami — one of the highest in recent history — set off a wave which became trapped in the bendy, narrow fjord for more than a week, sloshing back and forth every 90 seconds.
However, a more sober analysis indicates that Greenland has seasons in which the ice melts…and there has been a steady accumulation of ice despite the seasonal melts.
The surface of the Greenland ice sheet gains an average of 362 billion tons of ice every year, because a lot more snow falls than melts off the surface. During six of the last seven years, accumulation has been near or above the 1981-2010 mean.#ClimateScam pic.twitter.com/5WeuasSDxA
— Tony Heller (@TonyClimate) September 12, 2024
In fact, in a 2019 report, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration offered details on a Greenland glacier that was growing.
Also, massive landslides with global impact have occurred in ancient history…way before the invention of the internal combustion engine.
The destruction of Mount Etna would be catastrophic, but it wouldn’t be unprecedented. “We know from the geological record that volcanoes with gravitational instability have collapsed,” Morelia Urlaub, Ph.D., a marine geodynamics researcher at GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany and the paper’s first author, tells Inverse. “So there could be a chance that Etna’s flank may also collapse and cause a landslide that rapidly enters into the sea — which would cause a tsunami.” Understanding how and why the volcano moves and shifts will help scientists inform the public about the risks they face by living in the shadow of Mount Etna.
The volcano’s precarious state wouldn’t be a big deal if it was in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately, it’s surrounded by cities, towns, and farms, where the local wine industry benefits from the fertile volcanic soil. About 8,000 years ago, its eastern flank is thought to have collapsed, triggering a tsunami that destroyed a coastal community in present-day Israel, over 1,000 miles away across the Mediterranean Sea.
Events that impact our planet should be studied, but spare us the climate alarmism that distracts from innovative scientific investigation and appreciation of nature’s power.
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Comments
Warming doesn’t make glaciers calve into fjords. Warming causes glaciers to retreat up the slopes from which they descend. Glacial advance (which results in glaciers calving into water) is caused by heavy snow pack up hill, which exerts pressure downslope, causing the terminus (or snout) of the glacier to advance. When the advance pushes the terminus to a place where the ice is no longer supported (as when the glacier floats out over water, or goes over a cliff), ice breaks off from the glacier. That’s how calving works. Less snow deposition on a glacier results in less activity at the snout, not more, because glacial movement slows.
If you go out throwing those facts around you’ll be labeled a “Climate Denier” and “Unscientific”. We must all surrender our critical thinking to the “experts” who unanimously “agree” that we are facing an “existential crisis” that can only be averted by surrendering our liberties and treasure to an all powerful world government. If you want to know why they are called, “progressives”, it’s because that is the goal to which they seek progress.
There was a landslide in an Alaskan lake that caused a tidal wave over 1700 feet high – yes, seventeen hundred feet!
Lituya Bay, Alaska 1958.
lol. Beat me to it.
Japan’s massive 3/11 offshore earthquake triggered submarine landslides, one of those landslides created a 40m tsunami at Omoe Peninsula, Miyako City. It rode atop the original tsunami swell – a force multiplier.
2 minute video.
https://youtu.be/qHGfkfHV5rQ?si=vmx-BXUJJPnx0rP_
If you ever get a chance to take a cruise along the Alaskan coastline (something a highly recommend as a bucket-list item), you’ll almost certainly pass by an area called Lituya Bay, which is very near Glacier Bay National Park. That bay is where one of the largest waves in recorded history was measured, more than 1.500 feet. The wave was the result of a massive landslide triggered by a sizable earthquake. The results of the wave’s destruction are still clearly visible some 60+ years since the event (happened in late 1950s, IIRC). The reality is Alaskan fjords have seen innumerable rock/landslide and even glacier calving-induced megatsunamis just in the period of time it’s been a US territory.
Went fishing in Alaska for halibut and whatever would bite. Once you’re out in the ocean you’ll notice it.
Ring of Fire
The Ring of Fire, also referred to as the Circum-Pacific Belt, is a path along the Pacific Ocean characterized by active volcanoes and frequent earthquakes. The majority of Earth’s volcanoes and earthquakes take place along the Ring of Fire.
This Japanese man did the sensible thing – he didn’t dally and immediately fled to high ground – his house just 200 meters from the small sea wall.
He captures the whole event from beginning to end – with a brief walkabout after the tsunami surge had fully retreated.
I think it among the very best 3/11 videos – it teaches one should never delay moving to high ground. There’s a brief ten minute window to get to safety. Some of his neighbors stand next to the sea wall and likely didn’t survive (not shown getting swept away.)
A large tsunami slamming the US west coast will kill tens of thousands.
https://youtu.be/I-Bnk_tyMW8?si=eyK4k5ZA0lt_N1Eb
The water in the fjord sloshed back and forth for 9 days following a big splash?
I figure that fluid friction should have dampened oscillation quicker than that.
Let’s do an exact analysis:
1. Center of gravity of hill and fjord water drops (water goes up but hill dirt is heavier and goes down)
2. water is sloshed to the S end, imagine a straight line surface tipped high S low N. The center of gravity of the water is higher than average, for the N water has been in effect scooped up and piled at the S end.
3. water sloshes back northwards. In the middle the surface is level and the center of gravity of the water is at its lowest point. The water piled at the S end has been put back at the N end, in effect.
4. water is piled high at the N end, the center of gravity of the water is again high as in (2) but at the other end.
5. and so forth back and forth. The center of gravity of the water is high twice per cycle and low twice per cycle. That up and down of the center of gravity put a pressure wave on the ground under the fjord with that frequency, and that’s the seismic signal.
A Fjord, or a Tjoyota? 🙂
The most unintuitive source of seismic activity is standing water waves – waves that interfere with their reflection travelling the other direction giving peaks and nulls, so the water surface alternates flat and wavy in each cycle.
The unintuitive part is that the center of gravity of the water is higher when it’s wavy than when it’s flat, even though the average surface height is constant. So the whole average body of water itself goes up and down, producing seismic signals.
Melting glaciers retreat.
Growing glaciers push forward as pressure from the top forces the glacier face forward.
Or, if there’s not enough structure beneath them, they calve.
Leftists consider either of these to confirm whatever their current climate hysteria is.
While some people would blame “human-caused climate change”, I know for a fact it’s Trump’s fault.
I remember a proposal some years ago to ban deoxyribonucleic acid from all foods. The proposal (which was a joke) was taken seriously by a depressing number of people.
The manufactured hysteria over
global warming climate changeclimate instability serve a similar purpose: a source of government funding for crackpot scientists, while providing gullible college students and trust fund babies something socially acceptable to do.