From the “anything and everything is caused by climate change” department comes this groaner of a press release from UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Some points:
1. Glaciers, melt, calve, and make local tsunamis. It’s what they do and have been doing for millennia. Same for rockslides. Nothing new here. No climate change needed.
2. Seismic waves from glacier calving are nothing new, in fact in Antarctic they happen “all the time” according to the University of Leeds. At best, this is a novelty because the signal lasted nine days.
3. The “mega-Tsunami” and seiche (with continued seismic waves) only occurred because the narrow fiord meant the kinetic energy had no place to go. If it were calving to the open ocean, it would have just been another normal blip on the seismic radar and likely not noticed at all.
4. Reading the press release, it is easy to spot where the story has been embellished to make it more drama and less science. Sheesh.
5. The IPCC says there’s no connection between landslides and climate change at all saying in their most recent scientific assessment that they could not find any emerging signal linking climate change to landslides, nor do they anticipate any emergence in the future.
Below is Table 12.12 from Page 90 – Chapter 12 of the UN IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. Emergence of Climate Impact Drivers (CIDs) in time periods. The color corresponds to the confidence of the region with the highest confidence: white colors indicate where evidence of a climate change signal is lacking or the signal is not present, leading to overall low confidence of an emerging signal.
Have a look at the before (left) and after (right) photos below provided in the press release.
This affects nobody. Just another doom-mongering headline grabber for the ignorant press. The only thing true in the press release is the detection of the seismic ringing signal for nine days. The remainder is pure speculation.
Climate change-triggered landslide unleashes a 650-foot mega-tsunami
Wave created a seismic signal that lasted for nine days Peer-Reviewed Publication
University of California – San Diego
In September 2023, scientists around the world detected a mysterious seismic signal that lasted for nine straight days. An international team of scientists, including seismologists Alice Gabriel and Carl Ebeling of UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography came together to solve the mystery.
A new study published today in Science provides the stunning solution: In an East Greenland fjord, a mountaintop collapsed into the sea and triggered a mega-tsunami about 200 meters (650 feet) tall. The giant wave rocked back and forth inside the narrow fjord for nine days, generating the seismic waves that reverberated through Earth’s crust, baffling scientists around the world. This rhythmic sloshing is a phenomenon known as a seiche. Fortunately, no people were hurt, but the waves destroyed some $200,000 in infrastructure at an unoccupied research station on Ella Island.
“When we set out on this scientific adventure, everybody was puzzled and no one had the faintest idea what caused this signal,” said Kristian Svennevig, a geologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) and the study’s lead author. “All we knew was that it was somehow associated with the landslide. We only managed to solve this enigma through a huge interdisciplinary and international effort.”
Climate change set the stage for the landslide by melting the glacier at the base of the mountain, destabilizing the more than 25 million cubic meters (33 million cubic yards) of rock and ice – enough to fill 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools – that ultimately crashed into the sea. As climate change continues to melt Earth’s polar regions it could lead to an increase in large, destructive landslides such as this one.
“Climate change is shifting what is typical on Earth, and it can set unusual events into motion,” said Gabriel, whose work on this study was supported by the European Research Council, Horizon Europe, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA.
When seismic monitoring networks first detected this signal in September 2023, it was puzzling for two main reasons. First, the signal looked nothing like the busy squiggle that earthquakes produce on seismographs. Instead, it oscillated with a 92-second-interval between its peaks, too slow for humans to perceive. Second, the signal stayed strong for days on end, where more common seismic events weaken more rapidly.
The global community of Earth scientists started buzzing with online discussion of what could be causing the strange seismic waves. The discussion turned up reports of a huge landslide in a remote Greenland fjord that occurred on Sept. 16, around the time the seismic signal was first detected.
To figure out if and how these two phenomena might be connected, the team, led by Kristian Svennevig of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, combined seismic recordings from around the world, field measurements, satellite imagery and computer simulations to reconstruct the extraordinary events.
The team, comprised of 68 scientists from 41 research institutions, analyzed satellite and on-the-ground imagery to document the enormous volume of rock and ice in the landslide that triggered the tsunami. They also analyzed the seismic waves to model the dynamics and trajectory of the rock-ice avalanche as it moved down the glacial gully and into the fjord.
To understand the tsunami and resulting seiche, the researchers used supercomputers to create high-resolution simulations of the events.
“It was a big challenge to do an accurate computer simulation of such a long-lasting, sloshing tsunami,” said Gabriel.
Ultimately, these simulations were able to closely match the real-world tsunami’s height as well as the long-lasting seiche’s slow oscillations.
By integrating these diverse data sources, the researchers determined that the nine-day seismic signal was caused by the massive landslide and resulting seiche within Greenland’s Dickson Fjord.
“It was exciting to be working on such a puzzling problem with an interdisciplinary and international team of scientists,” said Robert Anthony, a geophysicist with the United States Geological Survey’s Earthquake Hazards program and co-author of the study. “Ultimately, it took a plethora of geophysical observations and numerical modeling from researchers across many countries to put the puzzle together and get a complete picture of what had occurred.”
The study’s findings demonstrate the complex, cascading hazards posed by climate change in polar regions. While no people were in the area when the landslide and mega-tsunami occurred, the fjord is close to a route commonly used by cruise ships, highlighting the need to monitor polar regions as climate change accelerates. For example, a landslide in western Greenland’s Karrat Fjord in 2017 triggered a tsunami that flooded the village of Nuugaatsiaq, destroying 11 houses and killing four people.
Gabriel said the results could also inspire researchers to comb back through the seismic record to look for similar events now that scientists know what to look for. Finding more seiches could help more clearly define the conditions that give rise to the phenomenon.
“This shows there is stuff out there that we still don’t understand and haven’t seen before,” said Ebeling, who co-authored the study with support from NSF and helped manage a network of seismic sensors that detected the seiche’s vibrations. “The essence of science is trying to answer a question we don’t know the answer to – that’s why this was so exciting to work on.”
Journal: Science, DOI 10.1126/science.adm9247
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scientists around the world detected a mysterious seismic signal that lasted for nine straight days. I was looking for a seismogram of this event, apparently no one has bothered to publish it.
Nor to get a very good for comparison after photo
From the Science article: “In this study, we demonstrate how this event started with a glacial thinning–induced rock-ice avalanche of 25 × 106cubic meters plunging into Dickson Fjord, triggering a 200-meter-high tsunami. Simulations show that the tsunami stabilized into a 7-meter-high long-duration seiche with a frequency (11.45 millihertz) and slow amplitude decay that were nearly identical to the seismic signal. “
No visual confirmation?
“25 × 10⁶ cubic metres”
So basically .. not all that big
Basically, a cube 1000 feet on a side. Seems like it would have to be very confined water volume and a very fast slide flow to get a wave that high.
“enough to fill 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools”
So actually rather small in the greater scheme of things.
Period of 87 seconds, seems pretty isolated frequency-wise
Anybody, I mean anybody with oceanographic training should know about seiches, not all that rare in partially enclosed waters. With all the hypotheticals (models) we read about, I guess there is more ‘brain’ in the supercomputer than at Scripps which used to be ‘the’ place which helped a lot in winning WWII with much smaller numbers of real scientists. I guess they consider punching buttons field work nowadays with nobody at the research station. “When we set out on this scientific adventure, everybody was puzzled and no one had the faintest idea what caused this signal,….The team, comprised of 68 scientists from 41 research institutions….”
That was not a tsunami. It was a splash wave.
“Ultimately, these simulations were able to closely match the real-world tsunami’s height as well as the long-lasting seiche’s slow oscillations.” I wonder how much they had to torture the data to get what they wanted?
As I commented to Myusername 2 threads ago –
Just because the highly tuned seismic sensors in the global seismographic network detect a pattern of diminishing “echoes” from a particular non-noteworthy event, does not translate to the Earth “wobbling”.
(“wobbling” is such a scientific term, isn’t it? How many “wibbles” are there in a “wobble“, and what intervals are there in a “wibble-wobble” effect?)
The clueless idiot posted a gruniad comic about this in a previous topic.
Proving itself to be the very epitome of ignorance and gullibility..
Years from now when global warming is totally debunked, people are going to look back on silly claims like this and wonder how anyone could take this ridiculous nonsense seriously.
The problem, Marty, is you are probably incorrect.
“Scientists” predicted worldwide starvation, peak oil, etc. etc. in the 60s and, as with AGW, were wrong on EVERY count. They are still interviewed and lauded to this day, nearly 60 years later.
Now that mosquitoes are carrying more tropical diseases in the US Northeast, is it finally possible that the DDT false narrative will be actually scientifically studied? As a child in the late 60s I was outside playing MANY TIMES when the USAF DDT planes sprayed the areas near Langley AFB, Fort Monroe, etc. in Virginia. Breathed it, mist fell on me. 68 years old and no ill effects so far. BUT what great spring and summer when they sprayed. We could play outside until after dark without continuous bites. Almost NO mosquitoes. The ban of DDT has killed MILLIONS in the tropics.
‘68 scientists from 41 institutions’. !!!
Alarming stuff for peer review getting to pretty slim pickings, it would seem.
An event of no consequence ‘caused’ by a glacier terminus that per the accompanying visual barely moved with normal calving, in northeast Greenland that seldom gets above freezing. Yup, typical global warming ‘science’.
Why does this remind me of a ‘Chinese fire drill’? Can we still say that?
Uh oh. Expect a loud knock on your door in 3…2…1…
It wasn’t caused by a glacier terminus, it was rocks from upstream that broke loose and slid down on top of the glacier into the fjord, look at the side-by-side image at the beginning of the post.
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At some point these guys need to quit wasting my tax dollars.
Tax dollars only exist to be wasted.
They are not yours anymore. They’ve got ownership now.
At some point these guys need to quit wasting my grandchildren’s tax dollars
“This shows there is stuff out there that we still don’t understand and haven’t seen before,”
Seiching in narrow or enclosed bodies of water was discovered by the first baby to take a bath in a bathtub. No peer review necessary.
The 1958 Alaskan Lituya Bay Tsunami caused by ice and rock was 1750 feet tall. Why wasn’t this blamed on Climate Change?
It was a rockslide that happened before its time 🙂
So, not a Paul Masson rockslide.
H/T Orson Welles.
To be fair, it was sort of “caused” by climate change. When global temperatures started warming 13,000 years ago and glaciers began to recede, they started calving more and making more waves than previously during summer ice melt. But that salient context wouldn’t be mentioned, of course.
Actually, there was probably considerably more caving, what with ice sheets reaching from sea to shining sea. In general, calving occurs because the glacier is growing and oops suddenly there is nothing under it to support all the additional ice.
Exactly. What warmunists point to (more ice falling into the ocean) as a result of global warming is actually proving just the opposite. Glaciers move only as a result of gravity – there is no other motive force. If glaciers are moving towards the sea, that is because glaciers exist on top of land that is higher than sea level or due to build up of ice upstream.
The rate at which glaciers move downhill/downstream is a function of two parameters – the vertical profile of the land under the glacier, with the steeper the slope the faster the glacier moves downhill… and the “hydraulic grade line” (a term engineers use), which is the slope of the surface of the ice itself (or liquid water, in a river) from its upstream source moving downstream to its discharge point, the sea. Just like a river. A moving glacier is just a slow moving river. The steeper the HGL the faster the glacier moves.
The land does not change slope quickly … it occurs over millions to tens of millions of years. So the real driver for “glacier change”, or the speed at which glaciers calve into the sea, is the change in hydraulic grade line, which occurs on vastly shorter timeframes (hundreds to thousands of years).
If a glacier is calving faster into the sea, the only significant cause would be more ice piled upstream.
200 meters high, sloshed for 9 days, sounds like major over-active imagination there, and maybe a “sloshed” party…. The pic doesn’t show a big enough slide to cause a “mega tsunami”. Not enough energy from a standing start….As far as a strong 9 day signal….maybe they should check their strip chart recorder again…9 hours sounds possible…9 days sounds like filter tank resonance.
I agree, that was my first reaction upon reading the Science abstract. Considering that from the photos the collapse involved nearly all ice, my thought was that >20 X 10^6 cubic meters of ice chunks floating in the fjord is going to severely dampen seiche activity by dissipating energy through friction. The 9 days does sound questionable; it must have taken a lot of model torturing to explain what might turn out to be ghost data. Modelling such sloshing with little losses due to friction in such an environment demands more scrutiny.
The anguished cries of a Climate Change cause, to someone who has spent considerable time on glaciers, seemed childishly jingoistic and demonstrative of scientifically amoral grifting, there is something wrong when so many scientists jump on bandwagons solely for money.
Len,
Might be related to sensitivity of instruments, able to detect very small signals. A lot of the generated fear of radioactiveiy was amplified by those sensitive Geiger counters going click click click, detecting levels so low that they were of no interest to anyone not in the scare the children industry. Seismometers are sensitive too. Geoff S
It does say the top of the mountain detached (landslide) which then flowed down the glacier filled valley to the sea, taking a chunk of ice with it into the water. Sort of like a ski slide.
The initial tsumani wave may have been quite tall, but it would have flattened very quickly, especially if the fiord was deep.
They say to about 7m.. Do we know how long the fiord was ?
Why does ice look so dirty? Where does these dirt particles come from? How much of global warming is due plain old dirt?
All that “carbon” in the atmosphere, don’tcha know.
Soot is black carbon that is released from fires.
I know, but I was referring to the odorless, colorless type.
Open this video and move to about the 8 minute mark. It is typical of valley glaciers to incorporate rock and to have the surface of the terminus look like asphalt.
Is there any placer gold in rock debris under the glacier that might be recovered as it melts and retreats?
Harold, I am aware of almost-perfect crystals of gold having been panned from a creek only a few meters downstream of a terminal moraine of a glacier. It’s a long and entertaining story, but this is a climate site and an inappropriate place for me to describe it.
As glaciers melt on the downhill face, material scoured from the land surface becomes exposed. A glacier can be on the whole gaining mass (ice) and still have a downhill face that melts simply because of the standard lapse rate of the atmosphere – about 4.6 deg F per 1,000 feet.
If in fact the glacier is gaining mass due to uphill/upstream ice accumulation, the result will be faster movement “downhill”. But at some point, the air temperature will be high enough to cause melting, leaving behind the “glacial till” (a combination of finely ground rock and larger particles up to boulders).
The upper midwest states, especially Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio are located more or less at the southern extremity of the Pleistocene glaciations in North America. As a result, the soils in those areas are unique – the topsoils tend to consist of very finely ground particles akin to flour, black in color, and very productive for crop growing. Overall soil depth above bedrock is rather thick, measured in tens of feet. All this is a result of the rock material from further north being pushed to where the glaciers finally terminated to the south.
It does not require “climate change” for the downhill edges of glaciers to collapse into the sea. It only requires gravity.
It was the rocks/mountain above the glaciers
Table 12.12 is utter nonsense. No one can detect a climate change signal in any of those things, because none of those things are outside the range of anything that’s happened before. Period. It’s just outright fraud. I would say scientific fraud, but there’s no science involved.