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Earthquakes And Climate Change
Trending News: The Science Behind The California Earthquake Is Frightening
Why Is This Important?Because this could be the start of the end of the world.
Long Story ShortA research paper has shown that droughts in California, linked to climate change, have caused land movement, which may increase seismic activity. However, scientists have denied that the land movements are significant enough to determine whether there will be an earthquake or not.
In the early hours of Sunday morning, a 6.0 magnitude earthquake struck with its epicenter around 10 miles south of Napa, Calif. The biggest quake in the Bay Area since 1989’s 6.9 has caused significant damage to buildings and could end up costing the Napa wine industry billions of dollars.
Three years of droughts in California have been linked to climate change and the water shortage of nearly 63 trillion gallons of water in the western USA is roughly equivalent to the loss of ice from Greenland due to global warming. The loss of groundwater has caused the land to move upwards as much as 0.6 inches underneath California’s mountains, according to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego. When there’s less water, the land rises up, and the change in pressure can have the effect of a coiled spring, possibly stimulating tectonic activity on the tectonic boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate.
However, researchers stated that the differences in pressure on the fault due to low groundwater levels are very small, and probably can’t make any significant impact on seismic activity, so as yet there is no smoking gun to link earthquakes like Sunday’s to global warming.
The only caveat to that is a study that was published in Nature last year which claims that groundwater depletion — both for natural and man-made reasons — is driving increased seismic activity.
"Our results suggest that long-term and late-summer flexural uplift of the Coast Ranges reduce the effective normal stress resolved on the San Andreas Fault. This process brings the fault closer to failure."
Own The ConversationAsk The Big Question: Am I contributing to increased earthquake risk?
Disrupt Your Feed: If climate change and water use is contributing to earthquakes, then the government needs to heavily regulate everything that adds to the risk.
Drop This Fact: 2013 was California’s driest year in recorded history, which dates back 199 years, and this year doesn’t look like it will be any better.