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THE Tsunami Thread (merged)

Re: Did global warming cause the Japan Earthquake/Tsunami?

Unread postby dohboi » Tue 07 Jun 2011, 07:38:55

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.
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Re: Did global warming cause the Japan Earthquake/Tsunami?

Unread postby Asterisk » Tue 07 Jun 2011, 23:32:44

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!
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Re: Did global warming cause the Japan Earthquake/Tsunami?

Unread postby Asterisk » Tue 07 Jun 2011, 23:55:36

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

but that doesn't change the fact that you should lighten up!
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Re: Did global warming cause the Japan Earthquake/Tsunami?

Unread postby rockdoc123 » Wed 08 Jun 2011, 09:43:31

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.
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Re: Did global warming cause the Japan Earthquake/Tsunami?

Unread postby dohboi » Wed 08 Jun 2011, 11:51:34

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.
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Re: Did global warming cause the Japan Earthquake/Tsunami?

Unread postby rockdoc123 » Wed 08 Jun 2011, 14:32:26

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.
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Re: Did global warming cause the Japan Earthquake/Tsunami?

Unread postby Lore » Wed 08 Jun 2011, 15:38:13

rockdoc123 wrote: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.
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Re: Did global warming cause the Japan Earthquake/Tsunami?

Unread postby dohboi » Wed 08 Jun 2011, 18:23:58

You beat me to it.
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Re: Did global warming cause the Japan Earthquake/Tsunami?

Unread postby rockdoc123 » Wed 08 Jun 2011, 19:27:44

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.
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Re: Did global warming cause the Japan Earthquake/Tsunami?

Unread postby Lore » Wed 08 Jun 2011, 19:34:26

rockdoc123 wrote:
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.
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Re: Did global warming cause the Japan Earthquake/Tsunami?

Unread postby Serial_Worrier » Wed 08 Jun 2011, 20:57:16

What a fail thread, mods please close this immediately.
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Re: Did global warming cause the Japan Earthquake/Tsunami?

Unread postby dohboi » Thu 09 Jun 2011, 03:45:49

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

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"
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Re: Did global warming cause the Japan Earthquake/Tsunami?

Unread postby mhr727 » Thu 02 Aug 2012, 15:35:39

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.
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Re: Did global warming cause the Japan Earthquake/Tsunami?

Unread postby dissident » Thu 02 Aug 2012, 21:11:25

mhr727 wrote: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.
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Re: THE Tsunami Thread (merged)

Unread postby Tanada » Wed 31 Jan 2018, 12:01:51

January 26, 1700, a tsunami hit the coasts of Japan without warnings. In Japan, a land with a long history of earthquakes and tsunamis, the connection between those two natural disasters was well known. Inscriptions on 600 years old stone markers, located near the coastal city of Kesennuma, warn "If an earthquake happens, beware of tsunamis." An earthquake happening on the bottom of the sea can displace large quantities of water, triggering a series of waves on the surface of the sea. Near the coast the waves build up in height, inundating large areas. But the tsunami in 1700 was different, apparently preceded by no earthquake, it became known in the scientific literature as the Orphan Tsunami.

Only three centuries later the truth was discovered, in part by studying myths from British Columbia and California. In many ancient stories, earthquakes are the results of a fierce battle between Thunderbird, the master of the sky, and Whale, master of the sea. Thunderbird tries to lift Whale into the air and drop him onto land, this causes the earthquakes. Whale tries to defend himself by creating large waves with his tail, inundating the land, this causes the tsunami.

Geologists nowadays think that such stories are based on real observations of earthquakes and tsunamis. The Cascadia region of North America is characterized by a chain of volcanoes, like the famous Mount St. Helens, feed by magma rising from the underground. The magma forms when parts of the Pacific plate, pushed beneath the American continent, slowly melts. The subduction zone, where the Pacific plate disappears beneath the continental crust of the American plate, is characterized by strong earthquakes and known also as the Cascadia-Megathrust. As friction is building up over the slow movements of both plates, the accumulated energy is suddenly released when the rocks in the underground can no longer sustain the pressure. On the surface an earthquake happens. Stories about a mythical battle between Thunderbird and Whale dating back just some generations suggested that an earthquake and a tsunami happened just some centuries ago, coinciding with the reports from Japan. Carbon dating on trees killed by the tsunami and preserved in swamps along the coast put the age of that earthquake in the range of the years 1695-1720. The earthquake, with an estimated magnitude of 8.7-9.2, was powerful enough to send a tsunami across the Pacific Ocean. Crossing the sea at jetliner speed, the tsunami came ashore in Japan, to produce flooding and minor damage there.

This simulation produced by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center shows that tsunami wave, starting off the coast of Washington and Oregon as the megathrust ruptures. It traveled up the bays and coastlines of these areas, inundating locations, depositing sediments there and killing the trees, that later made it possible to date this event.


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Re: THE Tsunami Thread (merged)

Unread postby dohboi » Sun 23 Dec 2018, 13:48:48

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/inpic ... 51404.html

Tsunami hits Indonesia


At least 168 people have been killed and over 700 injured after a volcano-triggered tsunami hit Indonesia's Sunda Strait on Saturday, sweeping away hundreds of homes and hotels, officials and witnesses have said...

The number of casualties may further increase as rescue workers reach affected areas.


Runup height reported from Java at 19 meters = over 62 feet!

The last 50 of the nearly extinct Java rhino may have been wiped out by the wave.
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Re: THE Tsunami Thread (merged)

Unread postby dohboi » Sun 23 Dec 2018, 14:38:04

Death toll now at least 222, over 800 injured...

More here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/ ... -indonesia
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Re: THE Tsunami Thread (merged)

Unread postby dohboi » Mon 24 Dec 2018, 08:18:00

Correction from above--the estimated wave height was 6-10 feet high.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/in ... af7a8a54b1

(Note to self--don't copy text from posters on other sites when they have no supporting links... :oops: )
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