A researcher from MIPT has suggested a new explanation for the Arctic’s climate warming. In his latest paper in Geoscienceshe indicates the heating might have been triggered by a collection of great earthquakes.
Climate warming is just one of the pressing problems faced by culture. It’s widely thought to be brought on by human action, which increases the concentration of greenhouse gases in the air. But this view doesn’t explain why temperatures occasionally grow fairly suddenly.
From the Arctic, among the factors driving climate warming is that the release of methane from permafrost and metastable gas hydrates from the shelf zone. Since scientists started to track temperatures at the Arctic, the area has seen two phases of warming: early from the 1920s and ’30s, and then starting in 1980 and continuing to today.
Leopold Lobkovsky, who wrote the analysis reported in this narrative, is a part of the Russian Academy of Sciences and also the mind of this MIPT Laboratory for Geophysical Research of the Arctic and Continental Margins of the World Ocean. In his paper, the scientist hypothesized that the unexplained abrupt climate warming might have been actuated by geodynamic elements. Specifically, he pointed to a run of great earthquakes at the Aleutian Arc, that’s the nearest seismically active area into the Arctic.
To test his theory, Lobkovsky needed to answer three questions. To begin with, did the dates of the wonderful earthquakes coincide with climate warming? Second, what’s the mechanism that permits the lithospheric disturbances to spread more than 2,000 km from the Aleutian Islands into the Arctic shelf area? Third, how can these disturbances intensify methane emissions?
The reply to the first question came from historic data analysis. It turned out the Aleutian Arc was really the site of 2 series of great earthquakes in the 20th century. Every one of these preceded an abrupt increase in climate warming by approximately 15 to 20 years.
It required model of lithospheric excitation dynamics to answer the second issue. The version utilized by the research explains the propagation of so-called waves and forecasts that they ought to travel at roughly 100 km each year. This agrees with all the delay between every one of the great earthquake string and the following temperature increase, as it required the disturbances 15 to 20 years to have transmitted over 2,000 km.
To answer the next question, the researcher suggested this explanation: The deformation waves coming in the shelf zone trigger minor added stresses in the lithosphere, which can be enough to interrupt the inner arrangement of these metastable gas hydrates and permafrost saving captured methane. This releases methane to the water of this shelf and air, resulting in climate warming in the area because of the greenhouse effect.
“There is a clear correlation between the great earthquakes in the Aleutian Arc and the phases of climate warming. A mechanism exists for physically transmitting the stresses in the lithosphere at the appropriate velocities. And these added stresses are capable of destroying metastable gas hydrates and permafrost, releasing methane. Each of the three components in this scheme is logical and lends itself to mathematical and physical explanation. Importantly, it explains a known fact — the abrupt rise in temperature anomalies in the Arctic — which remained unaccounted for by the previous models,” Lobkovsky commented.
According to the researcher, his version of climate warming will benefit from conversation and will probably be enhanced, and there’s a lot to be done to be able to confirm or rule out the suggested mechanism.
Related Journal Article: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3263/10/11/428