Clear, bright, sunshine and way-pleasant temps this near-noon Friday here in California’s Central Valley — nicer here than the southern part of the state where wildfires and earthquakes are causing a shitstorm of anxiety.
The shaking continues with a 3.4 magnitude quake near Malibu early this morning (yesterday a 4.7 in about the same spot) only adds to the worry, though, reportedly progress is being made on the so-called Bridge Fire in the San Gabriel Canyon, already covering more than 34,000 acres.
We’re way-well-known as the fire and quake state for a reason.
Instead of politics (however joyous Kamala makes it appear right now), let’s take a look at a weird-ass environmental incident that makes a striking argument for all of humanity being fucked really bad by climate change — if the T-Rump wins in November, we’re in even worse shape, so even a post on the climate crisis is really a back-stabbing poke at politics.
An environmental episode that’s peculiar and also worrisome, too.
The experience occurred this month a year ago, but researchers/scientists/experts in climate-goings-on had no idea what actually happened — a landslide and mega-tsunami in Greenland sparked the whole, entire planet to vibrate for nine days. No one knew WTF!
Research on the incident published yesterday in the journal Science revealed climate change was the real culprit behind it.
Prof Anne Mangeney, a landslide modeller at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris in France (the Guardian yesterday): ‘“Even more profoundly, for the first time, we can quite clearly see this event, triggered by climate change, caused a global vibration beneath all of our feet, everywhere around the world … Those vibrations travelled from Greenland to Antarctica in less than an hour. So we’ve seen an impact from climate change impacting the entire world within just an hour.”‘
Shit that’s really, really unsettling:
The skyscraper-sized tsunami that vibrated through the entire planet and no one saw https://t.co/Jrh50jfhr1
— The Conversation (@ConversationUK) September 12, 2024
Details via The Conversation yesterday afternoon by Stephen Hicks and Kristian Svennevig, two researchers on the project:
Earthquake scientists detected an unusual signal on monitoring stations used to detect seismic activity during September 2023. We saw it on sensors everywhere, from the Arctic to Antarctica.
We were baffled – the signal was unlike any previously recorded. Instead of the frequency-rich rumble typical of earthquakes, this was a monotonous hum, containing only a single vibration frequency. Even more puzzling was that the signal kept going for nine days.
Initially classified as a “USO” – an unidentified seismic object – the source of the signal was eventually traced back to a massive landslide in Greenland’s remote Dickson Fjord. A staggering volume of rock and ice, enough to fill 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, plunged into the fjord, triggering a 200-metre-high mega-tsunami and a phenomenon known as a seiche: a wave in the icy fjord that continued to slosh back and forth, some 10,000 times over nine days.
To put the tsunami in context, that 200-metre wave was double the height of the tower that houses Big Ben in London and many times higher than anything recorded after massive undersea earthquakes in Indonesia in 2004 (the Boxing Day tsunami) or Japan in 2011 (the tsunami which hit Fukushima nuclear plant). It was perhaps the tallest wave anywhere on Earth since 1980.
[…]
But beyond the weirdness of this scientific marvel, this event underscores a deeper and more unsettling truth: climate change is reshaping our planet and our scientific methods in ways we are only beginning to understand.
It is a stark reminder that we are navigating uncharted waters. Just a year ago, the idea that a seiche could persist for nine days would have been dismissed as absurd. Similarly, a century ago, the notion that warming could destabilise slopes in the Arctic, leading to massive landslides and tsunamis happening almost yearly, would have been considered far-fetched. Yet, these once-unthinkable events are now becoming our new reality.
Further from Julienne Stroeve, professor of polar modelling and observation at University College London: ‘“Glaciers play an important role for water resources around the world, and today all glaciers are retreating in response to climate change … In Greenland and Antarctica, glaciers discharge land ice into the oceans that contributes to sea level rise. Thus, loss of glacier mass impacts communities around the world that rely on them for freshwater and further raises global sea level, impacting coastal communities … Of course we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as that is the main driver behind ice melting all around the world these days … That will require strong political leadership which the world still seems to lack.”‘
Speaking of which — T-Rump’s horribly-wrong gibberish on probably the way-way-most-important issue facing all of humanity right now:
“You know, when I hear these poor fools talking about global warming. They don’t call it that any more, they call it climate change because you know, some parts of the planet are cooling and warming, and it didn’t work. So they finally got it right, they just call it climate change. They used to call it global warming. You know, years ago they used to call it global cooling. In the 1920s they thought the planet was going to freeze. Now they think the planet’s going to burn up. And we’re still waiting for the 12 years. You know we’re down almost to the end of the 12-year period, you understand that, where these lunatics that know nothing, they weren’t even good students at school, they didn’t even study it, they predict, they said we have 12 years to live. And people didn’t have babies because they said – it’s so crazy. But the problem isn’t the fact that the oceans in 500 years will raise a quarter of an inch, the problem is nuclear weapons. It’s nuclear warming … These poor fools talk about global warming all the time, you know the planet’s going to global warm to a point where the oceans will rise an eighth of an inch in 355 years, you know, they have no idea what’s going to happen. It’s weather.”
And Kamala Harris (The Washington Post on Tuesday):
Harris has said the United States must take action to fight climate change in the face of increasing drought, floods, hurricanes, wildfires and sea level rise. As vice president, Harris announced more than $1 billion in grants in 2022 for states to address flooding and extreme heat exacerbated by climate change. “The frequency has accelerated in a relatively short period of time,” she said. “The science is clear. Extreme weather will only get worse, and the climate crisis will only accelerate.’‘
Who ya’ gonna call?
And to close with some CGI right now but to become reality sooner than we know:
Vote like your life depends on it, or not, yet once again here we are…
(Illustration out front found here.)