"People often think of glaciers as inert and slow-moving, but in fact they can also move rather quickly," says Göran Ekström, professor of Geology and Geophysics. |
Global warming yields 'glacial earthquakes' in polar areasSeismologists at Harvard University and Columbia University have found an unexpected offshoot of global warming: "glacial earthquakes" in which Manhattan-sized glaciers lurch unexpectedly, yielding temblors up to magnitude 5.1 on the moment-magnitude scale, which is similar to the Richter scale. Glacial earthquakes in Greenland, the researchers found, are most common in July and August, and have more than doubled in number since 2002. Scientists Göran Ekström and Victor C. Tsai at Harvard and Meredith Nettles at Columbia reported on Greenland's glacial earthquakes in the journal Science. Ekström, Nettles, and colleagues first described glacial earthquakes in 2003, but that report did not recognize the seasonality or growing frequency of the phenomenon. |
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