Click image for the story. h/t to WUWT reader “Eric”.
I’m always amazed at the lack of historical perspective some people have related to natural disasters. It’s doubly amazing when reporters who work in newspapers, who have huge archive resources at their disposal, don’t even bother to look. Here’s some excerpts from the story:
“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.
…
Some experts claim that jump can be explained by the increased number of seismograph stations — more than 8,000 now, up from 350 in 1931 — allowing scientists to pinpoint earthquakes that would otherwise have been missed.
But this does not explain the recent increase in major earthquakes, which are defined as above 6 on the Richter magnitude scale. Japan’s earthquake was a 9.
Scientists have been tracking these powerful quakes for well over a century and it’s unlikely that they have missed any during at least the last 60 years.
According to data from the U.S. Geological Survey there were 1,085 major earthquakes in the 1980s. This increased in the 1990s by about 50 per cent to 1,492 and to 1,611 from 2000 to 2009. Last year, and up to and including the Japanese quake, there were 247 major earthquakes.
There has been also a noticeable increase in the sort of extreme quakes that hit Japan. In the 1980s, there were four mega-quakes, six in the 1990s and 13 in the last decade. So far this decade we have had two. This increase, however, could be temporary.
======================================================
A couple of faults in the argument, from the NYT, 1879:
As many as 200,000 people died in the 1855 quake.
And again in 1896:
and also….1923
h/t to Steve Goddard, who has been doing a lot of historical research here: http://news.google.com/newspapers
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Wouldn’t be the effect of rifts spewing out lava and expanding anywhere from 1 to 20 cm a year and smashing Japan’s little slice of the North American Plate between the Pacific and Eurasian Plates? Nah, couldn’t be that.
—-
Scottish Sceptic says:
March 16, 2011 at 4:56 am
Yes it could all be due to global warming!!
(dodge some rotten eggs and boos)
Seriously there’s more to this than normal stupid alarmist rubbish and if anyone doubts me I did some calculations which you can see here:
http://scottishsceptic.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/global-warming-and-earthquakes/
From the article:
““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.”
And there is literature that suggests this was an act of God, or gods, as a form of punishment on the Japanese people. Of course that doesn’t make it right, and neither is the idea that the earthquakes are a result of AGW. One can only shake one’s head.
Judd says @9:27-I believe we need to sacrifice quite a few virgins into volcanoes so as to stop this.
Hahaha….if we could only find any virgins. If you think it’s bad now, think how pissed Gaia would get if we substituted a bunch of sluts. M10s would break out everywhere, and the temperature…straight up by 5 degrees C.
My theory is that sluttiness is causing global warming. Think about it and you’ll come around to my way of thinking.
I’m waiting for them to say that nuclear disasters are caused by ACC. And later of course, the claims would be supported by peer reviewed papers published in Nature. Yup if only Japan had erected more wind turbines, they could have avoided all of this.
Mike D. says: “Obviously it’s the lack of human sacrifice that causes everything bad. We need more stone knives ripping out entrails on the temple altars.”
I’ll start making a list of names for you . . .
I got the distinct impression reading the original Calgary Herald story that the reporter heavily redacted what was stated by the experts.
Phrases like “it’s conceivable” are often followed by “but highly unlikely” when geologists speak of poorly known earth processes. I suspect the latter phrase was edited out the story.
vukcevic says:
March 15, 2011 at 11:44 pm
Quote from NASA’s paper: There is strong evidence of electromagnetic processes responsible for earthquake triggering,
This is not a ‘NASA’ paper. The authors just happen to work at NASA and the ‘paper’ is just a non-reviewed abstract. and there is no strong evidence for such a connection. On the contrary, every time a specific connection is claimed, it turns out not to be supported by the evidence. A good example is:
http://geomag.usgs.gov/downloads/publications/Thomas_et_al_Guam_GRL_2009.pdf
It is a very legitimate question to ask whether melting ice on a continental scale (not localized glaciers) can cause seismic activity. I am completely convinced that it does.
I’ll ignore the attribution to global warming and continue with the legitimate question.
The first thing is to separate which earthquakes are caused by tectonic plate movement and which are not. Otherwise you would have to believe that melting ice had an effect at the plate boundaries and then you would have to advance a method of separating the effects of melting ice from plate movement.
During this treatment of the data (easily done by spatial correlation of epicenters to plate boundaries) it is useful to ask if most or all of the extreme events (>7 magnitude) are located along tectonic margins or not. I suspect they are but have been wrong many times before. Has a major earthquake ever occurred away from a plate boundary?
Then take the earthquakes not associated with major tectonic plates and try to establish a correlation between their position and major continental ice masses where isostatic rebound would be greatest.
I would be very interested to read such work. I suspect that the time scale between melt and quake would be on the scale of several hundred years because the earth would rebound very slowly.
Journalism is dead. The MSM is the propaganda adjunct of the “progressive” elites. The Narrative = The Party Line
And they’re not even honest propagandists.
Prediction: There will be a big increase in the number of lame CAGW press releases over the course of 2011. This is because the government/academic climate elites are about to see their Climate Ca$h gravy train come to a screeching halt as people begin to realize they’ve wasted millions of our tax dollars on frivolous and dubious “science”.
The article ran in both the Calgary and Montreal papers. It was distributed by Post Media. I sent an email complaint to key editors at the papers, the Post, and author — citing the numerous ‘could’ ‘speculate’ ‘conceivable’ hedges and that the story was better served in their Religion section.
The email addresses for the editors are readily available at their websites. I did not include the NY Times and Gridley papers which are facsimile’d in the posts above, but encourage anyone else to pass along.
Isostatic rebound doesn’t happen overnight. Ice age ended thousands of years ago, but the whole Northern Europe is still rising. Occasionally some “intraplate earthquakes” happen here but those rarely exceed M3.
R. Kessel, F. Freund, G. Duma of
Lab for Solar and Space Physics, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt,
Department of Physics, San Jose State University and Ecosystem Science and Technology, NASA Ames Research Center
Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics, Department of Geophysics, Hohe Warte 38, A-1190 Vienna
say:
There is strong evidence of electromagnetic processes responsible for earthquake triggering, that we study extensively.
http://www.cosis.net/abstracts/EGU06/01705/EGU06-J-01705.pdf
Dr. Leif Svalgaard of Stanford University
says:
there is no strong evidence for such a connection.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/15/really-you-had-to-ask-this-question/#comment-621778
vukcevic (of nowhere in particular)
says:
Let’s have another look.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/gms.htm
It is as if these people have never looked at a question critically in their lives.
The earthquake was manmade seismic activity – Charlie Sheen was banging 7 gram rocks
It’s even worse than I thought. After a full read of the article I realize the glaciologist is proposing the loss of ice is having an effect on mantle material near plate boundaries.
“Some scientists theorize that the sudden melting of glaciers due to man-made climate change is lightening the load on the Earth’s surface, allowing its mantle to rebound upwards and causing plates to become unstuck.”
First, I didn’t know the plates were stuck. Second, I was unaware that this “sudden” melting had just started in the last 50-60 years. And third, I didn’t know how silly the study of glaciology had become.
“…Hahaha….if we could only find any virgins. If you think it’s bad now, think how pissed Gaia would get if we substituted a bunch of sluts.”
It is however unlikely that Gaia would move for them.
Look to the sun.
vukcevic says:
March 16, 2011 at 6:35 am
“there is no strong evidence for such a connection.”
Every time specific claims are examined, no evidence is found. E.g.
http://www.leif.org/EOS/2008JA013932.pdf
Regarding the comment from The Gray Monk: You are too late, if this snippet is real:
http://www.climatechangedispatch.com/Latest-News/ipcc-boss-says-warming-causes-earthquakes-report.html
If correlation is causation, it’s just as likely that earthquakes cause global warming.
Journalism is chronicling of events and these journalists are attempting to write history in an area where they have no business or knowledge.
Their ability to create a headline and proceed to write the story to fit the headline and their ability to reach the public with the story places them in a unique position of public trust and influence.
What comes to mind with fibbers like these is the old schoolyard chant of “LIAR LIAR PANTS ON FIRE”.
True journalists would not lie in their work.
About the only thing we know for sure regarding global warming is that the warming of the globe is indeed the cause of earthquakes and the resulting tsunamis– not the atmosphere surrounding the earth, but the interior of the globe where the nuclear fires fuel tectonic movement. Everything else is speculation.
So embarrassed by my compatriots. On behalf of Calgary, sorry for wasting your time.
Theo Lichacz says:
Ever see spliting of granite or marble(the old fashioned way), you get the idea? have a stone chip on one side of your windshield that develops into a xmas tree like fracture on the other side?
I saw that movie too: Crack in the World
Ever hear of the “uncertainty principle”
Yes. It has to do with determining the position and momentum of particles in quantum physics. Unless you’re referring to still more fiction?
Pamela Gray says:
Here we go again. Blame the public school. …
Remember, children spend their time constantly learning new things (and questioning adults). Adults spend their time telling others what they know, and usually don’t spend much time questioning it.
Pamela,
I don’t need to make any assumptions, since I have one child still in public school. Children in public school are not taught to question. Quite the contrary – from my experience, they are very specifically taught to NOT question what they are told by “Authority” (Authority being the teachers, the administration, and the government in general). I spend a great deal of time dealing with the crap that my child and her friends are taught – typically after tests, so that they don’t get confused and answer their biased tests with REAL facts.
You, personally, might be a good teacher, but you can’t extrapolate from that to assume that all, or even most, public school teachers are good.