Bill McGuire is a professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, and he’s here to tell you that Climate Change not only wreaks havoc with our weather patterns, but that it can move tectonic plates too. That’s right — more earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis for us!
Quartz conducted an interview with McGuire on his new book, Waking the Giant: How a changing climate triggers earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes. Needless to say, he’s not optimistic about the current trajectory of our planet.
There have been other periods of climate change, for instance, during the PETM period 55-66 million years ago, but that as humans we have released fossil fuels into the atmosphere over a very short period of time, 200 years. McGuire says this will cause and has caused all kinds of “feedback effects,” particularly in Greenland and Alaska, which has lost a lot of ice that could trigger earthquakes.
But wait, there’s more! Says McGuire:
So if Greenland starts seeing earthquakes, there’s a worry that we would see submarine landslides. One such landslide happened in Scandinavia about 8,000 years ago. It sent down a huge tsunami all the way across the Atlantic. Shetlands saw 20-meter (66-foot) waves, and Scotland saw [waves] six meters high. And Greenland has the same potential.
McGuire spends the rest of the long interview unpacking how this would happen, and also points out that climate change could have accelerated recent volcanic eruptions in Iceland. It’s a fascinating read, as well as a frustrating one, given how slow we’ve been on actually addressing this issue.
(via Quartz)