General Chat

[Gabby15]

I know. It's almost like he has yet to see a naked lady..... In fact i am sure that is the reason!

What's Rob's excuse then?

[Baselayers]

Horny old man syndrome! ;-)

For what it's worth you are amusing!

[Gabby15]

Horny old man syndrome! ;-)

For what it's worth you are amusing!

Phase one has worked 8)

Phase 2: ????????????

Phase 3: Profit

[Anthony]

Bought my ticket for Blackburn the other day. Now I'm umming and ahing about train tickets. Will prob go on Rev's line from Marylebone, but the sticking point is what time ticket should I get for the return? Or should I go for an open return in the unlikely event that a) I meet any of you lot, I don't think you're an idiot, c) you don't think I'm an idiot and d) we go for beers after the game.

[tonyh29]

you had me right up until C) :winkold:

[tonyh29]

For what it's worth you are amusing!

i can do amusing

just saying like

[Designer1]

Show us where you piss from :x

I hope she doesn't have a catheter bag.

[villa4europe]

I have a headache. Good result though! :-)

Show us where you piss from :x

Deary me. How uncouth.

it doesnt quite have the charm of get your rat out does it?

[JulieB]

Was quite surpsied to read that melting ice caps and climate change could be part of the cause for the increase in geologic happenings we're experiencing...eg earthquakes, volcanic activity etc.

I heard they were removing the word gullible from the OED

Gullible eh? Well you'll have to argue that with the scientists then..

Reuters

Just reading..various reports on Reuters..and from a few years back with rising sea levels adding to the pressure on the Tectonic plates et al...

OSLO (Reuters) – A thaw of Iceland's ice caps in coming decades caused by climate change may trigger more volcanic eruptions by removing a vast weight and freeing magma from deep below ground, scientists said on Friday.

They said there was no sign that the current eruption from below the Eyjafjallajokull glacier that has paralysed flights over northern Europe was linked to global warming. The glacier is too small and light to affect local geology.

"Our work suggests that eventually there will be either somewhat larger eruptions or more frequent eruptions in Iceland in coming decades," said Freysteinn Sigmundsson, a vulcanologist at the University of Iceland.

"Global warming melts ice and this can influence magmatic systems," he told Reuters. The end of the Ice Age 10,000 years ago coincided with a surge in volcanic activity in Iceland, apparently because huge ice caps thinned and the land rose.

"We believe the reduction of ice has not been important in triggering this latest eruption," he said of Eyjafjallajokull. "The eruption is happening under a relatively small ice cap."

Carolina Pagli, a geophysicist at the University of Leeds in England, said there were risks that climate change could also trigger volcanic eruptions or earthquakes in places such as Mount Erebus in Antarctica, the Aleutian islands of Alaska or Patagonia in South America.

This was from as far back as 2007...from the Guardian

Melting ice cap triggering earthquakes

· Estimates of sea-level rise out of date, say scientists

* Paul Brown in Ilulissat

* The Guardian, Saturday 8 September 2007

* Article history

The Greenland ice cap is melting so quickly that it is triggering earthquakes as pieces of ice several cubic kilometres in size break off.

Scientists monitoring events this summer say the acceleration could be catastrophic in terms of sea-level rise and make predictions this February by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change far too low.

The glacier at Ilulissat, which supposedly spawned the iceberg that sank the Titantic, is now flowing three times faster into the sea than it was 10 years ago.

Robert Corell, chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, said in Ilulissat yesterday: "We have seen a massive acceleration of the speed with which these glaciers are moving into the sea. The ice is moving at 2 metres an hour on a front 5km [3 miles] long and 1,500 metres deep. That means that this one glacier puts enough fresh water into the sea in one year to provide drinking water for a city the size of London for a year."

He is visiting Greenland as part of a symposium of religious, scientific, and political leaders to look at the problems of the island, which has an ice cap 3km thick containing enough water to raise worldwide sea levels by seven metres.

Yesterday Christian, Shia, Sunni, Hindu, Shinto, Buddhist and Jewish religious leaders took a boat to the tongue of the glacier for a silent prayer for the planet. They were invited by Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader of 250 million Orthodox Christians worldwide.

Dr Corell, director of the global change programme at the Heinz Centre in Washington, said the estimates of sea level rise in the IPCC report were based on data two years old. The predicted rise this century was 20-60cm (about 8-24ins) , but it would be at the upper end of this range at a minimum, he said, and some believed it could be two metres. This would be catastrophic for European coastlines.

He had flown over the Ilulissat glacier and "seen gigantic holes in it through which swirling masses of melt water were falling. I first looked at this glacier in the 1960s and there were no holes. These so-called moulins, 10 to 15 metres across, have opened up all over the place. There are hundreds of them."

This melt water was pouring through to the bottom of the glacier creating a lake 500 metres deep which was causing the glacier "to float on land. These melt-water rivers are lubricating the glacier, like applying oil to a surface and causing it to slide into the sea. It is causing a massive acceleration which could be catastrophic."

The glacier is now moving at 15km a year into the sea although in surges it moves even faster. He measured one surge at 5km in 90 minutes - an extraordinary event.

Veli Kallio, a Finnish scientist, said the quakes were triggered because ice had broken away after being fused to the rock for hundreds of years. The quakes were not vast - on a magnitude of 1 to 3 - but had never happened before in north-west Greenland and showed potential for the entire ice sheet to collapse.

Dr Corell said: "These earthquakes are not dangerous in themselves but the fact that they are happening shows that events are happening far faster than we ever anticipated."

No two ways about it there's an awful lot of activity...

IRIS

[Chindie]

The Guardian piece on earthquakes isn't strictly an earthquake IIRC, unless you call any tremor through the ground caused by anything an earthquake. Earthquakes aren't caused by impacts onto the crust, they're caused by the crust itself being moved against other parts. By this thinking, the tremor felt through the ground caused by an explosion would be called an earthquake. It isn't.

And the Reuters piece doesn't seem to suggest that climate change will make them happen more often, it might allow them to happen more often. There's a difference.

I can't say I particularly buy either.

There also not more activity IIRC than what might be expected. When the earthquake off South America happened recently I remember linking to a pece that said activity was actually slightly down IIRC.

[JulieB]

This was from the Independent back in 2007 and there's a few more reports coming out on this in last few days....

Cause of Climate change debate is not the issue...but there's no doubts the ice caps are melting and sea levels rising.

Shockwaves from melting icecaps are triggering earthquakes, say scientists

By Daniel Howden, in Ilulissat, Greenland

Saturday, 8 September 2007

High up inside the Arctic circle the melting of Greenland's ice sheet has accelerated so dramatically that it is triggering earthquakes for the first time.

Scientists monitoring the glaciers have revealed that movements of gigantic pieces of ice are creating shockwaves that register up to three on the Richter scale.

The speed of the arctic ice melt has accelerated to such an extent that a UN report issued earlier this year is now thought to be out of date by its own authors.

The American polar expert Robert Correll, among the key contributors to the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report issued in February, described the acceleration as "massive".

Estimates of the likely rise in sea levels this century vary, and the IPCC published a conservative range of between 20cm-60cm. But those estimates are now heavily disputed, with many scientists insisting that new data collected since the IPCC report suggested a rise closer to two metres. Professor Correll said there was now a "consensus" that a significant acceleration in the loss of ice mass has occurred since the last report.

The revelations came at a conference in the north of Greenland, which has drawn world religious leaders, scientists and environmentalists to the Ilulissat Icefjord. Ilulissat is home to the most active glacier in Greenland and it was one of the immense icebergs that calve from it on a daily basis that is believed to have sunk the Titanic. The Arctic is acknowledged as the fastest warming place on earth.

The local Inuit population, whose lives have been drastically altered by the changing climate, were yesterday led in a silent prayer for the future of the planet by the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the organiser of the arctic symposium and spiritual leader of the world's 250 million Orthodox Christians.

Greenland's ice cap is immense, the second largest in the world, and its break-up would be catastrophic. The packed ice is up to two miles thick and its total collapse into the ocean would raise worldside sea levels by seven metres.

At the Ilulissat Icefjord, 250km north of the Arctic Circle, the advance of the glacier into the sea is now visible to the naked eye. "It's moving toward the sea at a rate of two metres an hour," said Professor Correll. "It's exuding like toothpaste, moving towards us at 15 kilometres per year."

One day's worth of the Ilulissat ice would provide enough fresh water to supply the largest cities in the world for a whole year – and yet it amounts to only 7 per cent of Greenland's total melt.

As the glaciers thaw, pools of water are forming, feeding fractures in the ice, down which the water flows until it hits the bedrock.

"These so-called moulins are phenomenal," said Professor Correll, who said they had been remarkably scarce when he first visited the glacier in 1968. "Now they are like rivers 10 or 15 metres in diameter and there are thousands of them."

He compared the process to putting oil underneath the ice to make it move forward faster.

As the reality of the unprecedented thaw becomes apparent, the consequences are outstripping the capacity of scientific models to predict it.

Earthquakes, or glacial ice quakes, in the north-west of Greenland are among the latest ominous signs that an unprecedented step change is under way. The Finnish scientist Veli Albert Kallio is one of the region's leading ice experts and has been tracking the earthquakes.

"Glacial earthquakes in north-west Greenland did not exist until three years ago," he said.

The accelerating thaw and the earthquakes are intimately connected, according to Mr Kallio, as immense slabs of ice are sheared from the bed rock by melt water. Those blocks of ice, often more than 800m deep and 1500m long, contain immense rocks as well and move against geological faults with seismic consequences. The study of these ice quakes is still in its infancy, according to Professor Correll, but their occurence is in itself disturbing. "It is becoming a lot more volatile," said Mr Vallio. Predictions made by the Arctic Council, a working group of regional scientists, have been hopelessly overrun by the extent of the thaw. "Five years ago we made models predicting how much ice would melt and when," said Mr Vallio. "Five years later we are already at the levels predicted for 2040, in a year's time we'll be at 2050."

This dramatic warming is being felt across the Arctic region. In Alaska, earthquakes are rocking the seabed as tectonic plates – subdued for centuries by the weight of the glaciers on top of them – are now moving against each other again.

In the north of Sweden, mean temperatures have risen above zero for the first time on record.

Professor Terry Callaghan has been working in the remote north of the country at a research station which has been taking continuous readings for the past 100 years. His recent findings tally with the accelerating pace of change elsewhere.

"Mean temperatures have remained below zero here since medieval times," said Professor Callaghan. "Now, over the past 10 years we have exceeded zero, the mark at which ice turns to water." Professor Correll said: "We are looking at a very different planet than the one we are used to."

[Chindie]

Now, you see, what you've done there is just link to a different report saying the same thing. It isn't an earthquake. I don't care if it registers on the Richter scale, if you put a machine to register seismic activity in a working quarry it'd register activity that was likely rather high. It doesn't make it an earthquake.

I'm not arguing that the climate is changing or whatever, what I'm arguing is that that isn't making volcanic activity any more common and earthquakes happen.

[Brumerican]

I can't see how global warming, which is an atmospheric condition, has any effect on subterranean geology ?

[JulieB]

Scientists say melting glaciers could induce tectonic activity.

The reason? As ice melts and waters runs off, tremendous amounts of weight are lifted off of Earth's crust. As the newly freed crust settles back to its original, pre-glacier shape, it can cause seismic plates to slip and stimulate volcanic activity according to research into prehistoric earthquakes and volcanic activity.

Sharon Begley of The Wall Street Journal recently wrote about the subject in her "Science Journal" column, noting that new research suggests that when ice sheets retreated some 10,000 years ago, volcanoes in the Mediterranean, Antarctica and California became more active.

Begley spoke with Allen Glazner of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, a geoscientist who has studied the phenomenon. Analyzing an 800,000-year record of volcanic activity in eastern California, Glazner found that "the peaks of volcanic activity occurred when ice was retreating globally. At first I thought it was crazy, but other scientists also found evidence that climate affects volcanism" (quoted in Begley's article).

With Earth's glaciers and ice gaps melting at increasing rates due to climate change, it is conceivable that we could see further impact from "isostatic rebound" in the Earth's crust. Begley cites work by Patrick Wu, a professor of geophysics of the University of Calgary, which suggests that past disappearance of ice "may still be contributing to quakes in eastern Canada."

"The pressure of the ice sheet suppresses earthquakes, so removing that load triggers them," Wu told Begley. "Present-day earthquakes may have their origin in postglacial rebound."

Bill McGuire, professor of Geophysical Hazards at University College, spelled out the scenario further in an article in New Scientist, titled "Climate change: Tearing the Earth apart?"

"It shouldn't come as a surprise that the loading and unloading of the Earth's crust by ice or water can trigger seismic and volcanic activity and even landslides. Dumping the weight of a kilometre-thick ice sheet onto a continent or removing a deep column of water from the ocean floor will inevitably affect the stresses and strains on the underlying rock," he wrote. "[While] not every volcanic eruption and earthquake in the years to come will have a climate-change link... [As] the century progresses we should not be surprised by more geological disasters as a direct and indirect result of dramatic changes to our environment."

[JulieB]

I can't see how global warming, which is an atmospheric condition, has any effect on subterranean geology ?

Neither did I until the last few days...then I started looking into it a bit on the net...interesting!

[JulieB]

Scientists to explore link between climate change and earthquakes, volcanoes

Posted by Graham_Land in Climate change, Science & Technology, 19 Apr 2010, 2

The death toll from the earthquakes that struck western China last Wednesday has passed 1,700. The quakes occurred in Qinghai province, a mainly Tibetan region of the country; and resulted in 1,706 deaths and 12,128 injured with 256 still missing according to a piece in Sunday’s Guardian.

Yesterday, China’s president Hu Jintao visited Qinghai and promised a swift rebuilding of the area, where Tibetan Buddhist monks have been conducting an impressive rescue and relief effort.

The Guardian article also mentions that some suspect human activity may have played a role in the earthquakes:

Many blamed Chinese mining for causing the disaster, while some monks complained they had not been given sufficient credit for their rescue work.

Though no solid connection has been established between seismic and human activity, there is good scientific evidence pointing to dam construction in Japan exacerbating the effects of earthquakes and causing mudslides.

In fact, scientists spoke out today about the need for more study into linkages between rising temperatures associated with climate change and disasters such as volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides and tsunamis.

From another article in the Guardian:

Experts say global warming could affect geological hazards such as earthquakes because of the way it can move large amounts of mass around on the Earth’s surface. Melting glaciers and rising sea levels shift the distribution of huge amounts of water, which release and increase pressures through the ground.

Richard Betts, a Met Office scientist, said there was no evidence to connect China’s recent deadly earthquakes or the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano with current global warming levels. Yet according to an article in the Telegraph, research published in the Royal Society has linked climate change with geological activity in Alaska.

Even small changes in the environment could trigger activity such as earthquakes and tsunamis.

–Telegraph

All this may sound far fetched, but it seems to be mostly connected with the movement of water and the associated shifts in weight on the Earth’s crust due to melting ice, rainfall and sea level rise. It also has to do with the interconnected nature of geological phenomena, such as volcanic activity causing landslides and glacial melt.

It certainly makes a lot more sense than a senior Iranian cleric’s claims that extra-marital sex causes more earthquakes in his country. Apparently, women who don’t wear traditional Islamic garb literally make ‘the Earth move under my feet’. Hopefully not too many people take this argument seriously, but if this was the case, shouldn’t Brazil be in ruins by now?

Not sure who the hell the site is but the quotes are from Royal Society, Guardian & Independent articles apparently. Here

[leviramsey]

Again with the current best way to get funding for a research project being "studying the effects of climate change on...", it's not surprising to see scientists in whatever field hypothesizing that climate change can lead to something they research as a matter of course.

I bet I could get a few hundred grand for researching the effect of climate change on long-ball tactics.

[tonyh29]

ice melts and waters runs off, tremendous amounts of weight are lifted off of Earth's crust

well there if the flaw straight away ... a 100g of water will still freeze into a 100g of ice.. have these researchers confused the difference between volume and density ?

[mjmooney]

So, is climate change is causing volcanic explosions, or are volcanic explosions are causing climate change?

[jonno_2004]

It's all about the neutrinos!