HEATQuakes

Climate change isn't warming the planet, it's shaking Earth's foundations

- by PROF BILL MCGUIRE

Astonishingly, earthquakes shake the US state of California almost 9,000 times a year, on average — that’s about once every hour. California's official nickname is the Golden State, harking back to the mid-19th-century gold rush that saw its population explode in just four years, from 14,000 to a quarter of a million. But if you've ever been lucky enough to visit and felt the ground move beneath your feet, you'll probably agree that ‘the Earthquake State’ is a far better fit.

None of this should be a surprise given that it hosts the San Andreas Fault, where two of the world’s great tectonic plates — the North American plate to the east and the Pacific plate to the west - meet.

California has attracted the world’s attention in recent years, not for its earthquakes, but more for its wildfires and flash floods — all supercharged by global heating and its disruption of our once-stable climate. The news, then, that such extreme weather could also promote earthquake activity is far from welcome in one of the planet's biggest seismic hotspots.

GEOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES

When we think about climate change, it’s usually in terms of how the atmosphere and oceans are heating up. The idea that it can also affect the ground beneath our feet seems almost laughable. Nonetheless, it’s true.

For decades, I've been researching how the climate can drive deadly geological phenomena, like earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions, and the evidence is absolutely clear. The latest piece of research by the Swiss Seismological Service, published this summer, links swarms of small tremors beneath Mont Blanc in the European Alps to rapid thawing of ice and snow during a heatwave in 2015.