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.
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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