With the persistence of the climate change crisis, people could be wondering if this could affect the frequency and intensity of earthquakes.
The reality is that climate change may exacerbate seismic activity in the future.
Earthquakes
While earthquakes in general are among the most terrifying and intriguing natural disasters, the most dangerous and biggest kind is tectonic earthquakes. These take place due to massive rock slabs that make up the upper mantle and crust of the Earth. Such slabs are called tectonic plates.
The plates end up moving around 0.5 inches each year thanks to heat that emanates from deep within the Earth. This makes them rub against one another.
Such pressure in the area accumulates until it reaches a breaking point where sudden movement of plates takes place. This leads to earthquake-causing energy releases.
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Climate Change Could Exacerbate Earthquakes
Climate change could end up making such earthquakes happen nearer to one another and with greater intensity.
Thanks to global warming, glacier melts are happening at an increased rate. As the water of these glaciers enter the sea, the land that previously sat underneath it starts rising.
In such cases, differences in pressure could trigger dormant faults to go off and cause earthquakes.
The particularly concerning glacial-melt earthquakes are those that could happen as a result of sea level rises. With such increasing levels, underwater seafloor pressure also rises. Such pressure spikes could lead fault line pressures near the coast to also go up.
As several earthquakes run late in their own seismic cycles, minimal pressure increases could be sufficient to advance their clock. This could be enough to cause earthquakes in several locations.
According to geophysicist Marco Bohnhoff from Free University Berlin and GFZ Helmholtz Centre Potsdam, it may take around 1,000 years for sea level rises to stop even if humanity ended greenhouse gas emissions today. The geophysicist thinks that during such a period, big coastal earthquake gaps could end up shorter.
On top of this, during the monsoon season of summer, up to four meters worth of rainfall's weight compresses the crust horizontally and vertically. This ends up stabilizing the crust.
As the water disappears during the winter, this ends up destabilizing the area and increasing earthquake frequency.
Such a phenomenon could be intensified further by climate change. Based on climate models, monsoon rainfall intensity across South Asia could soar due to climate change. This may end up boosting the winter rebound and triggering greater seismic activity.
Though looking into how climate change and earthquakes are linked to each other could be quite intriguing, it may not help with earthquake predictions. While earthquakes always occur, they cannot be predicted. The issue is not why they happen, but why they end up growing large.
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