Question:

Is there a link between melting ice sheets and earthquakes?

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Is there a link between melting ice sheets and earthquakes?

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8 ANSWERS


  1. Hello

    Ice is melting because of Global Warming.

    Earthquake is based on relocation of Rocks/Sands in Earth.


  2. Non at all

  3. yes.  Ice weighs a lot.  A lot!  enough to weigh down the crust, to cause the crust to sink.  When the ice melts, the crust "rebounds", it rises back up (slowly).  Earthquakes happen as a result of this movement.  We are talking hundreds of feet of vertical movement over a few thousand years in some places.

  4. As ice sheets melt, they can release pent-up energy and trigger massive earthquakes, according to new study.

    Global warming may already be triggering such earthquakes and may cause more in the future as ice continues to melt worldwide, the researchers say

    A series of large earthquakes shook Scandinavia around 10,000 years ago, along faults that are now quiet, the scientists point out.

    The timing of each earthquake roughly coincided with the melting of thick ice sheets from the last ice age in those same places.

    Researchers had suspected that the melting had triggered these earthquakes by releasing pressure that had built up in Earth's crust.

    Now a new study, the first to use sophisticated computer models to simulate how ice sheets would affect the crust in the region, bolsters this scenario.

    The study showed that earthquakes are "suppressed in presence of the ice and promoted during melting of the ice," said study leader Andrea Hampel of the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany.

  5. Yes It seems so, according to a computer model showing that earthquakes happen less often in areas covered by ice caps. Trouble is, quakes come back with a vengeance when the ice melts.

    Andrea Hampel at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, and colleagues wondered why Scandinavia experienced a surge in tectonic activity around 9000 years ago, whereas few earthquakes occur there today. They realised that the earthquake flurry coincided with the melting of the Fennoscandian ice sheet, which blanketed the area in the last ice age.

    To discover why, they devised a model to test how geological faults respond when buried beneath several hundred metres of ice. They found that the vertical stress placed on the Earth's crust by a heavy ice sheet can suppress many types of fault from slipping and causing a quake.

    Though the faults are pinned down for a time, stresses in the crust continue to build, so when the ice melts, earthquakes occur more strongly and more frequently (Earth and Planetary Science Letters, DOI: 10.1016/j.epsl.2008.02.017). This has already been been observed in Alaska, says Hampel. She warns that Greenland and Antarctica could experience more earthquakes as their ice sheets disappear

    Good night to you my little  Sunflower xoxo

  6. They are both a result  from Global warming or so we are led to believe. I personally think that this has all happened b4 and is Mother Earth renewing herself.

  7. Yes! They are both linked by the fact you learn about them in geology class.

  8. no there is no link. earthquakes are caused by moving tectonic plates deep underground. no relation to melting ice sheets. we cause that. :)

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