Earthquakes have become very common in the most northerly region of the United States in Alaska. In a recent paper, scientists from the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska Fairbanks have pointed out that the earthquakes may have had nothing to do with the natural movement of tectonic plates and everything to climate change.
Published in the journal Advancing Earth and Space Science, the paper is entitled “Stress Promotion of the 1958 Mw∼7.8 Fairweather Fault Earthquake and Others in Southeast Alaska with Glacial Isostatic Alteration and Interstellar Stress Movement”. show the melting of glaciers in Alaska. causing the earth to reverse.
The recent study notes that Alaska has some of the largest glaciers in the world, which may be thousands of feet thick and cover hundreds of square miles. This large accumulation of frozen ice creates just as much pressure as it does to submerge the submerged land. And now that the planet’s temperatures are rising at an unnatural rate due to greenhouse gases, those glaciers are melting. When large lumps of glaciers melt into the warming oceans, the frozen ground from time to time returns as a sponge which then creates earthquakes in the area.
Chris Rollins, lead author of the study who conducted the research while at the Geophysical Institute, said in a press release that there are two parts to the construction movement. He said that the first is called the ‘elastic effect’, which is when the ground immediately recovers from the removal of a mass of ice and the second is the long impact from the mantle rising back to high below the empty space.
Researchers link an expanding movement to the epicenter with frequent earthquakes across southeastern Alaska, where glaciers have been disappearing for more than 200 years. In this area over 1,200 cubic miles of ice has been lost in the two centuries.
The South Alaska region divides the border into the middle of the North American continental plateau and the Pacific Ocean which intersects at about two inches a year which is nearly twice the level of the San. Andreas in California. The research has found that the disappearance of glaciers has also caused the landfall of southeastern Alaska to rise by about 1.5 inches each year.