Government adviser Bill McGuire says global warming is causing earthquakes and landslides

I learned about Professor McGuire's research from a book review in the British weekly magazine "New Scientist".

The way a bottle or can with over-pressurized contents will erupt when the top is removed.

www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/9312347/Hay-Festival-2012-Government-adviser-Bill-McGuire-says-global-warming-is-causing-earthquakes-and-landslides.html

By Geoffrey Lean
6:38PM BST 05 Jun 2012

Global warming is causing earthquakes and giant landslides, and could bring about an age of “geological havoc” including “volcano storms” and tsunamis, a top academic told the Telegraph Hay Festival today.

Bill McGuire, Professor of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College, London - and a member of the Government's Natural Hazard Working Group, established after the 2004 tsunami – said: “climate change is already beginning to affect the solid earth. We are seeing the effects today”.

The geological disasters are caused by melting ice cover and rising sea levels, Prof McGuire explained. Ice sheets weigh down the ground beneath them, which rises as they disappear, causing geological stresses: the meltwater runs into the oceans, which then become heavier an depress the seabed, with similar results.

Research shows that this happened at the end of the last ice-age, when Scandinavia, for example, “bounced back up by 300 metres”, suffering earthquakes that measured 8 on the Richter scale. In all, 52 million cubic kilometers of water poured into the oceans, raising sea levels by 130 metres, and causing more quakes. One caused a huge submarine landslide of sediment off Norway's West coast, which triggered a tsunami that hit Scotland and the Shetlands.

At much the same time Iceland suffered a 1,500 year long “volcano storm”, with the number of eruptions increasing more than thirty fold, when its 1 km thick icesheet thinned. The weight of the ice had prevented active volcanos underneath it from releasing magma: they blew when the pressure was released.

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Professor McGuire has written a book on this subject "Waking the Giant"

http://www.billmcguire.co.uk/


There is a radio show, which I have not yet listened to at
http://prn.fm/tag/bill-mcguire/#axzz1xthiiWBm

There is a longer, more detailed article at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/26/why-climate-change-shake-earth