Posted by: 
Far from being the benign figure of mythology, Mother Earth is short-tempered and volatile. So sensitive in fact, that even slight changes in weather and climate can rip the planet's crust apart, unleashing the furious might of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and landslides.
That's the conclusion of the researchers who got together last week in London at the conference on Climate Forcing of Geological and Geomorphological Hazards. It suggests climate change could tip the planet's delicate balance and unleash a host of geological disasters. What's more, even our attempts to stall global warming could trigger a catastrophic event (see "Bury the carbon").
Evidence of a link between climate and the rumblings of the crust has been around for years, but only now is it becoming clear just how sensitive rock can be to the air, ice and water above. "You don't need huge changes to trigger responses from the crust," says Bill McGuire of University College London (UCL), who organised the meeting.
You don't need huge changes to trigger a response from the crust. They can be tiny.
Among the various influences on the Earth's crust, from changes in weather to fluctuations in ice cover, the oceans are emerging as a particularly fine controller. Simon Day of the University of Oxford, McGuire and Serge Guillas, also at UCL, have shown how subtle changes in sea level may affect the seismicity of the East Pacific Rise, one of the fastest-spreading plate boundaries.
Source: New Scientist
Comments
14 October 09 | wade norris
More details on this subject -
http://www.praer.org/2009/09/climate-change-whole-lot-of-sh.html
In the recent climate change debate, some of our leaders, like Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, are still insisting that these are cyclical, natural changes, or that global warming is not real because "God is still up there".
I foresee that a decade from now -- when we see all the damage that has happened -- Sen. Inhofe's comments on climate change will be viewed as some of the most misguided statements ever made by a senator.
Why?
There was a significant development that occurred yesterday, as an 8.3 earthquake struck Samoa and set off tsunami warnings in the South Pacific. Comparisons were being made to the Indian Ocean earthquake, which was the worst earthquake ever recorded at over 9 on the Richter scale.
The same fault line in Indonesia become active the day after Samoa - from Huffington Post
A powerful earthquake struck western Indonesia on Wednesday, triggering landslides and trapping thousands under collapsed buildings - including two hospitals, an official said. At least 75 bodies were found, but the toll was expected to be far higher.
The temblor started fires, severed roads and cut off power and communications to Padang, a coastal city of 900,000 on Sumatra island. Thousands fled in panic, fearing a tsunami.
Buildings swayed hundreds of miles (kilometers) away in neighboring Malaysia and Singapore.
In the sprawling low-lying city of Padang, the shaking was so intense that people crouched or sat on the street to avoid falling. Children screamed as an exodus of thousands tried to get away from the coast in cars and motorbikes, honking horns.
The magnitude 7.6 quake occurred at 5:15 p.m. (1015GMT, 6:15 a.m. EDT), just off the coast of Padang, the U.S. Geological Survey reported. It occurred a day after killer tsunami hit islands in the South Pacific and was along the same fault line that spawned the 2004 Asian tsunami that killed 230,000 people in 11 nations.
...and the damage in Samoa was worse than previously reported
From Huffington Post
APIA, Samoa -- Disaster officials rushed food, medicine and a temporary morgue to the Samoas on Wednesday after a powerful earthquake unleashed a tsunami that flattened villages and swept cars and people out to sea. At least 119 people were killed. Survivors fled to higher ground on the South Pacific islands after the magnitude 8.0 quake struck at 6:48 a.m. local time (1:48 p.m. EDT; 1748 GMT) Tuesday
This earthquake was followed by yet another quake in Sumatra as the Guardian reports.:
A second powerful earthquake has hit the Indonesian island of Sumatra, a day after the first devastating quake left more than 500 dead, thousands of people buried in rubble and a major city cut off from the outside world.
Today's quake, of magnitude 6.9, struck in the early hours about 180 miles from the epicentre of yesterday's more powerful tremor out at sea.
There were 529 confirmed deaths from the first quake, said relief officials, although the figure was likely to rise.
Many scientists are reporting that these events are unrelated - which very well may be true.
As you will read below, there is a common denominator to the tectonic instability that is being witnessed.
How can this be? Well, the Earth's tectonic plates have sensitive fault lines, which when triggered to move, cause earthquakes and volcanoes. As a sphere, the Earth 'reflects' vibration internally, so that an earthquake in the South Pacific is picked up by seismologists across the world -- say in Alaska. The Indonesian quake resonated so strongly that it set off quakes in Alaska. (Samoa also had a 7.9 earthquake in March.)
Now, add in this to the equation. In Greenland, and to a lesser extent, Antarctica, ice sheets and glaciers are melting and more importantly, sliding in rapid bursts. This is caused by moulins, which are holes that melting water form from the top of a glacier to the bottom. The water then lubricates and melts the underside of the glacier, causing them to detach from the bedrock -- and creating a 'slip-n-slide' for glaciers that weigh in the megatons -- some the size of Manhattan.
Robert Corell, chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, said in Ilulissat [Greenland] 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 meters an hour on a front 5km [3 miles] long and 1,500 meters 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."
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.
The result, each 'slide' of these multi-ton glaciers sets off an 'ice quake' that register an average of 3 to 5 on the Richter scale. This might sound minor, but these are occurring multiple times a year. This means that the Earth is being jolted repeatedly by these ice quakes, destabilizing faults lines which has many, many consequences.
The latest scientific discipline to enter the fray over global warming is geology.
And the forecasts from some quarters are dramatic - not only will the earth shake, it will spit fire.
A number of geologists say glacial melting due to climate change will unleash pent-up pressures in the Earth's crust, causing extreme geological events such as earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions.
A cubic metre of ice weighs nearly a tonne and some glaciers are more than a kilometre thick. When the weight is removed through melting, the suppressed strains and stresses of the underlying rock come to life.
(from Alan Glazner, a volcano specialist at the University of North Carolina)
"When you melt glacial ice, several hundred metres to a kilometre thick . . . you've decreased the load on the crust and so you've decreased the pressure holding the volcanic conduits closed.
"They're cracks, that's how magmas gets to the surface . . . and where they hit the surface, that's where you get a volcano."
And it is not likely to slow down, but may instead speed up:
...quakes ranged from six to 15 per year from 1993 to 2002, then jumped to 20 in 2003, 23 in 2004, and 32 in the first 10 months of 2005 - matching an increase in Greenland temperatures.
LET ME REPEAT THAT STATISTIC...
...quakes ranged from six to 15 per year from 1993 to 2002, then jumped to 20 in 2003, 23 in 2004, and 32 in the first 10 months of 2005 - matching an increase in Greenland temperatures.
That is tripling of earthquakes in a 15 year period and more importantly an exponential change in the activity.
And there are Scientists who are seeing evidence of a verifiable tectonics correlation.
"(Dr. Taira) and his team studied repeating earthquakes because they provided a "background frequency" against which changes in the fault could be compared.
"These events happen regularly and the size of the event is about the same," he told BBC News.
"But after Sumatra, the frequency changed - it increased - but the magnitude decreased.
"That is a signal of the fault weakening; you only have to push a little bit and the fault fails."
This trend is causing changes exponentially. For instance, since the Arctic has opened an ice free passage, the Arctic is no longer a stationary sea -- currents from the Pacific and the Atlantic are encroaching into the Arctic circle and creating an additional heating feedback loop -- which is as equally dangerous as a heating feedback loop as the loss of reflective ice.
This video highlights the feedback loop that scientists are seeing in Greenland.
["src":"http://www.youtube.com/v/Lf2iGpeeg88"]
(ain't it sad that Al Jazeera is doing a better job of covering this than our media?)
And, sadly, the latest report from the IPCC reflects this exponential change, as scientists report now that even if the world's countries commit to all of the recommendations to reach by 2050 -- (which the U.S. Senate is likely to block) the Earth's temperature will rise 6.3 degrees by 2100.
This is not good, since scientists worldwide have agreed that to survive climate change, we must limit the temperature rise to 2 degrees.
So, not only are we on a path that with displace as many as 75 million people by 2050, many of them islanders, but we are also putting many more people in peril due to the threat of this increased tectonic activity.
The industrialized countries must change their polluting policies and begin to think about their responsibility for the Indonesian earthquake that resulted in 229,866 people lost, including 186,983 dead and 42,883 missing.
These may have been the first wave of people who have died in a widespread fashion from the unintended effects of climate change.
And yes, even though as some will argue, tectonic plates have been moving for thousands of years, it is a fact, that the climate is changing, the Arctic is heating, and Ice Quakes are increasing, all due to human made pollution.
Since writing this story Tuesday, I feel both vindicated and horrified to see the very things I am worried about happening - and to see that our Senate is still waffling on the middling, do little, but necessary ACES Climate bill. We must do pass much, much more effective legislation and recognize the legal status of Environmental Refugees.
There are many changes that are going to happen, and we are going to have to realize, globally, that we are all in this together. Most importantly, we must begin to talk openly about adaptation to these global changes, and not act in merely a reactionary approach.
08 December 09 | Annie Moultrie
Small island States today
Small island States today called on industrialized countries to take a leadership role at the Bali Climate Change Conference and adopt targets to keep the world from warming past the point where catastrophic impacts would occur. “No island should be left behind,” said Angus Friday of Grenada in his research paper, the Chairman of the Alliance of Small Island States. These vulnerable countries, he said, are already feeling the impact of climate change in the form of more hurricanes, cyclone and typhoons.