Climate change doesn't cause hurricanes, but it can
increase the frequency and ferocity of them.
Climate change doesn't cause droughts, but it can increase the severity
and persistence of them. Climate change
doesn't cause earthquakes, either.
Or does it?
A geophysicist, Chris Milliner of NASA's JPL at CalTech,
noted that when 53 inches of rain fell on Huston during hurricane Harvey, the
town sank by 2 cm. Those 53" represented 33 trillion gallons of water.
Water weighs 8.34 lbs per gallon.
Do the math. That's 137 billion,
610 million tons. No wonder Houston
sank.[1]
Okay, and then when the water receded, Houston rose back up
again. That's a good thing, right? Well, it depends on how fault-ridden the
bedrock under Houston is. Turns out
Houston is not a seismically active region, so there were no significant earthquakes
detected.
A book by Bill McGuire titled Waking the Giant discusses the effects of climate change on the Earth's
crust. [2] At the end of the last ice
age, 20,000 years ago, kilometers thick sheets of ice covered much of North
America and Europe, sea levels were 425 feet lower, and the average global
temperature was 11°F cooler. Then the
rapid melting of ice caps and filling of ocean basins shifted the distribution
of enormous weight on the crust of the Earth.
This caused earthquakes, volcanoes, underwater landslides, and
tsunamis. But not all of the glaciers
melted and the global temperature stabilized.
Until humans discovered coal and the Industrial Age began. We are now on track, with human-caused rapid
global warming, to see these things resume.
California is a different story than Houston. According to Warren Cornwall of Reuters,
shifting water weight can trigger small earthquakes in California.[3] During the driest time of year, late summer
and early fall, the weight of water in California is minimal. Then come the rains. Reservoirs begin to fill. Ground water is replenished. And the weight of water on California's
network of criss-crossing geologic faults increases. This causes a pattern of increased frequency
of earthquakes during certain times of year.
As the climate changes, oceans warm, storms pick up more
water and become much more violent, and unprecedented volumes of water weigh
down on California's faults. Earthquakes
are going to be the result.
As if that isn't a dire enough prediction, we may even see
some new volcanoes![4]
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