A tsunami caused by a landslide in a Greenland fjord. Melting IceResearchers told AFP on Friday that activity at the volcano was the cause of stunning earthquakes that shook the globe for nine days last year.
According to a report recently published in the journal Science, the earthquake recorded in September 2023 was caused by giant waves rocking back and forth in Dikson Fjord in eastern Greenland.
“What’s completely unique about this event is how long the seismic signal lasted and how consistent its frequency was,” one of the report’s authors, Christian Svennevig of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, told AFP.
“There have been seismic signatures with other landslides and tsunamis, but they only lasted for a few hours and were very localized. This earthquake was observed all over the world, all the way to Antarctica,” he said.
The phenomenon initially surprised the scientific community, which defined it as an “unidentified seismic object” and later determined its source to be a landslide.
In September 2023, 882 million cubic feet of rock and ice (the equivalent of 25 Empire State Buildings) fell into a remote, uninhabited fjord about 124 miles out to sea.
The landslide caused a massive tsunami 650 feet high at the epicenter.
More than 40 miles away, a research station on Ella Island was hit by a tsunami more than 12 feet high.
“When my colleagues first discovered this signal last year, it didn’t look like an earthquake at all,” Stephen Hicks, a scientist with a PhD in geosciences who helped write the report, told BBC News. “It continued to appear every 90 seconds for nine days.”
According to BBC News, a group of scientists began discussing the strange signal on an online chat platform.
The team created a model to show how the waves swayed back and forth over a nine-day period.
“We’ve never seen such massive water movement over such a long period of time,” Hicks told BBC News.
The collapse was caused by the thinning of glaciers at the base of the mountain, a process that Climate ChangeAccording to reports.
“As the Arctic continues to warm, we can expect these events to become more frequent and intense in the future,” Svennevig said.
“We have no experience dealing with the kind of Arctic warming we are currently seeing,” he added.
He stressed the need to put in place early warning systems, but noted that this would be difficult in such extreme environments.
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