Melting Glaciers Contribute to Alaska Earthquakes
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:
Melting Glaciers Contribute To Alaska Earthquakes:
In 1958, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake triggered a debris avalanche into Southeast Alaska's Lituya Bay. Displacing estimated 40 million cubic yards of water in an instant, the avalanche created a wave that ran 1,700 feet up a mountainside before racing out to sea. The largest known tsunami in history was taller than the Empire State Building in New York - 1,454 feet (or 443,2 meters) tall.
[...] Researchers now think the region's widespread loss of glacier ice helped set the stage for the earthquakes and their increasing intensity.
In a recently published research article, scientists with the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute found that ice loss near Glacier Bay National Park has influenced the timing and location of earthquakes with a magnitude of 5 or greater in the area during the past century.
[...] Alaska has some of the world's largest glaciers, which can be thousands of feet thick and cover hundreds of square miles. The ice's weight causes the land beneath it to sink, and, when a glacier melts, the ground springs back like a sponge.
[...] "There are two components to the uplift," said Chris Rollins, the study's lead author who conducted the research while at the Geophysical Institute. "There's what's called the 'elastic effect,' which is when the earth instantly springs back up after an ice mass is removed. Then there's the prolonged effect from the mantle flowing back upwards under the vacated space."
Journal Reference:
Chris Rollins, Jeffrey T. Freymueller, Jeanne M. Sauber. Stress Promotion of the 1958 Mw7.8 Fairweather Fault Earthquake and Others in Southeast Alaska by Glacial Isostatic Adjustment and Interearthquake Stress Transfer [open], Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth (DOI: 10.1029/2020JB020411)
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