Posted on 06/09/2006 3:16:04 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Imagine the surface of Earth as a giant trampoline that accumulated a slab of ice over the winter, and you can get a sense of what a growing number of scientists say is in store for the planet as glaciers keep melting.
Once the trampoline's ice turns to water that drips over the edges in the warm days of spring, the concave elastic slowly rebounds to its original flat shape. That's how Earth responds as glaciers retreat, and the consequences promise to be ... interesting.
The reason is that one cubic meter of ice weighs just over a ton, and glaciers can be hundreds of meters thick. When they melt and the water runs off, it is literally a weight off Earth's crust. The crust and mantle therefore bounce back, immediately as well as over thousands of years. That "isostatic rebound," according to studies of prehistoric and recent earthquakes and volcanoes, can make the planet's seismic plates slip catastrophically, and cause magma chambers that feed volcanoes to act like bottles of shaken seltzer.
"It's unavoidable that glacial retreat will induce tectonic activity," says geoscientist Allen Glazner of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
The connection between melting glaciers and earthquakes isn't to be confused with a myth that zipped through cyberspace after the 2004 Asian tsunami. It claimed that global warming (which is not even two degrees above historical averages so far) heated magma, causing seismic plates to shift. No.
Instead, the world-wide melting of glaciers portends a seismically active future because of isostatic rebound and also because the meltwater from liquefying glaciers adds mass atop oceanic plates. That creates a teeter-totter effect, further destabilizing the planet's crust. "Recent findings reinforce the idea that the solid earth and the climate are inextricably linked," says Prof. Glazner.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
The connection between melting glaciers and earthquakes isn't to be confused with a myth that zipped through cyberspace after the 2004 Asian tsunami. It claimed that global warming (which is not even two degrees above historical averages so far) heated magma, causing seismic plates to shift. No.
Don't confuse these myths, keep them separate.........
The old Coyote Road Runner, trampoline, teeter-totter effect. Got it.
Bush's fault for not signing Kyoto.
PING!!!
What say you?
The guy is a friggin' genius!!!
This explains all the volcanoes right here in North Dakota... no doubt leftovers from the last ice age.
Thanks, I needed another good laugh today...
Finally, JIMMY HOFFA FOUND!
Ahah!
So a mountain (where most glaciers are, last tiem I looked) composed of several millions of tons of rock, is going to "move" seismically when a few tons of water/ics are removed from the mountian.....
But the moutain is moving more than every day by the moon's tides........ Yes, land moves also, we just see water more.
Something doesn't add up here.
and the ocean is lifted/dropped, causing immense change in pressure on the sea floor. All of these deltas are dependant on the precise distance from the moon, the sun, and other planetary bodies.
Add in the variables of the density and structure of the materials in the earth's surface, and the pressures they are being subjected to, and .... prediction is mostly a joke.
If global warming is melting all the glaciers we should not let them go to waste!
This is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. We can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious fluids.
Mine the glaciers now and mix a drink of pure grain alcohol and rainwater!
Me, I suspect it would take melting the size of the ice sheets covering North America and Europe at the end of the ice age to cause earthquakes.
Probably not. Glaciers grind granite into dust. Got to be pretty tough on huts and wooden boats.
LOL!
No contest. (And only applicable to the south pole anyway.)
Actually, they are digging at an old viking farm that was covered as the ice advanced. I don't think it was directly covered by ice, though, but rather by the silt and sand pushed by the ice.
http://www.ualberta.ca/~publicas/folio/38/16/03.html
Lets see, global warming is causing volcanos to erupt.
Global warming is only 2 degrees above average.
When Pinatubo erupted, they figured it dropped temperatures about 1 degree for a few years.
My amateur conclusion from this information. Global warming melts glaciers, melted glaciers cause global cooling, global cooling causes glaciers.
Kyoto was during the Clinton years. My understanding is he signed it, but never had it before the Senate. In other words his signature was worth nada, the same as Bush not signing it.
You know that and I know that but the lefties are to stupid to realize it.
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