THE Tsunami Thread (merged)

[dohboi]

Actually, F, I really just wanted to share the piece about NISA admitting that things were twice as bad as what they first reported, but I couldn't find the general Fukushima thread and I happened across this other (old) blog link so I thought I'd post it.

As I understand it, the claim in the latter is that (eventually at least) the lessening of weight at/near the poles as the ice caps melt will redistribute weight on the earth in such a way that we should see increase in seismic activity around the world. I have no idea whether that has any validity, but given the enormous tonnage that is being shifted, it did not seem totally cuckoo as a hypothesis.

The point, to me, of the former, added to our experience with the Gulf gusher last summer, is that it is generally a fair bet that any real time official pronouncements made about a major disaster are likely to be understated by at least half (or by orders of magnitude, in the case of the Deepwater Horizon fiasco.) Not a surprising conclusion, but one to keep in mind for the next inevitable set of mega-disasters.

[Asterisk]

You are really the life of the party let me tell you Dor!

I actually did have quite a few insults when I first posted this thread, as in "what are you an idiot....global warming causing earthquakes!?"

Turns out it's not such a crazy argument after all.

In any case, lighten the hell up dude!

[Asterisk]

On second thought, it was a pretty dumb thing to say...just deleted it

but that doesn't change the fact that you should lighten up!

[rockdoc123]

Turns out it's not such a crazy argument after all.

exactly where do you get that reasoning?
As I said Japan is nowhere near melting icecaps. And there is absolutely no way that you can transmit the extensional stresses from Greenland across several plate boundaries and a combination of oceanic, transitional and continental crust to somehow make an earthquake happen in Japan. Even if there were enough stresses built up to result in an earthquake from ice melting (you would have to melt a tremendous amount) those stresses would find the easiest path to release which would be via shallow crustal faulting and earthquakes with very shallow epicentres. The Japan earthquakes are deep.
This is pseudo-science at it's worst.
If on the other hand someone wants to demonstrate their skills with tensor transforms and stress/strain theory to show how this could work then please have at it.

[dohboi]

http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/Scientists+link+melting+glaciers+earthquakes/4449816/story.html

Scientists link melting glaciers to earthquakes

Experts ponder whether tectonic activity increasing

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.

These scientists point to the historical increase in volcanic and earthquake activity that occurred about 12,000 years ago when the glaciers that covered most of Canada in an ice sheet several kilometres thick suddenly melted.

The result was that most of Canada's crust lifted -and is still rising.

Scientists have discovered that the accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet over the last 10 years already is lifting the southeastern part of that island several millimetres every year.

The surface of the Earth is elastic. A heavy load such as a glacier will cause it to sink, pushing aside the liquid rock underneath.

The Greenland glacier is about three kilometres at its thickest and it is believed that its weight has depressed sections of the land under the glacier about one kilometre. In fact, the weight of the glacier is so great that significant portions of Greenland have been pushed well below sea level.

"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 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.

Of course, conceivable and provable are two very different things. But conceiving it clearly does not deserve the rude dismissal of many here. What there does seem to be something of a consensus on is that melting glaciers can create local, shallow quakes.

[rockdoc123]

Sweet Jesus....the guy is a glaciologist not a structural geologist or rock mechanics expert nor someone who works with geophyisics. What he is suggesting is preposterous from the perspective of rock mechanics and what we know about the response of the asthenosphere to uplift.
The only field observations that have been done to suggest a link between glacial melting and faulting were done in Iceland and the researcher (whose name escapes me at the moment) noted that the faulting was very shallow and very moderate which is exactly what stress/strain theory would predict. Crustal isostatic uplift from Greenland melting would be recognized in Greenland, not millions of miles away. If any faults resulted they would be situated near the place of stress relief. The upward movement of asthenospheric melt is offset by the creation of thicker crust (the crust uplifts and what was previous partial melt becomes solid). Notwithstanding all of that the rate at which the ice is melting is actually slow and the only way you could argue that it would cause a massive earthquake (an instantaneous event) in the shallow crust would be to argue that the crust stays in disequilibrium for a long period of time (undercompensated) which flies in the face of the notion that melt from the ice creates increased pore fluid pressure along pre-existing planes of failure...hence one would expect relative continuous movement rather than sporadic.
Again feel free to show me how you relay stresses resulting from glacial isostatic rebound millions of kilometres through plate boundaries in the brittle crust and near Newtonian fluid in the asthenosphere to create earthquakes at a plate margin in Japan.

[Lore]

Sweet Jesus....the guy is a glaciologist not a structural geologist or rock mechanics expert nor someone who works with geophyisics. What he is suggesting is preposterous from the perspective of rock mechanics and what we know about the response of the asthenosphere to uplift.

And Anthony Watts is just a former TV meteorologist.

[dohboi]

You beat me to it.

[rockdoc123]

And Anthony Watts is just a former TV meteorologist.

Ok, you obviously think this fellow is correct. Please explain why with particular attention to the points I raised.

[Lore]

And Anthony Watts is just a former TV meteorologist.

Ok, you obviously think this fellow is correct. Please explain why with particular attention to the points I raised.

It's not about whether he is correct or not, but your hypocrisy in choosing who is and is not an expert in your view.

[Serial_Worrier]

What a fail thread, mods please close this immediately.

[dohboi]

What a fail poster SW is. Mods, please delete all his posts and ban him from the site.

Meanwhile, things if Fukushima are turning out to be really bad:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/8565020/Nuclear-fuel-has-melted-through-base-of-Fukushima-plant.html

Nuclear fuel has melted through base of Fukushima plant

1:06AM BST 09 Jun 2011

The findings of the report, which has been given to the International Atomic Energy Agency, were revealed by the Yomiuri newspaper, which described a "melt-through" as being "far worse than a core meltdown" and "the worst possibility in a nuclear accident."

A spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power Co. said the company is presently revising the road-map for bringing the plant under control, including the time required to achieve cold shutdown of the reactors.

Yeah, revising the time line, like to "nevagonnaf'nhappeneva"

[mhr727]

I personally think its the other way around, the 2 major earthquakes that caused Tsunami,s from what i have read and seen, caused a slight variation in the earths axis and or rotation. i,m curious to see if these factors have increased the rate at which the glaciers are retreating. Everything i read states that since 2004 melting has accelerated. and of course it is too soon since the Japan Earthquake/Tsunami to really notice any change but it may be happening now.

[dissident]

I personally think its the other way around, the 2 major earthquakes that caused Tsunami,s from what i have read and seen, caused a slight variation in the earths axis and or rotation. i,m curious to see if these factors have increased the rate at which the glaciers are retreating. Everything i read states that since 2004 melting has accelerated. and of course it is too soon since the Japan Earthquake/Tsunami to really notice any change but it may be happening now.

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/featur ... 10314.html

The shifts are basically of no significance for surface insolation. Now if the day was changed by a few minutes and the wobble changed by a few dozen kilometers then a small but noticeable effect on insolation would be there. But since the axis of rotation cannot be shifted by earthquakes you would just get an additional oscillation instead of a systematic shift in the insolation. So it is not likely that any systematic melt of glaciers would occur. No known earthquake could produce a shift in the Earth's wobble by dozens of kilometers. It would have to be a collision with a huge celestial object and there are none that large in the inner solar system. The "dwarf planet" objects such as Eris are not going to collide with the Earth any time soon.