Interview: A rocky link between climate change and earthquakes

Geologists like Chuck Bailey, chairman of the geology department at the College of William and Mary, point to a clear link between the increased weight of water on Earth's surface and seismic activity.

He joined Morning Edition host Phil Liles to talk about this connection, and how the planet could be seeing a rise in the number of earthquakes over the years.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Phil Lyles: Professor Bailey, according to new studies on climate change, and how it affects earthquakes, the connection appears to be due to the weight of water on the Earth's surface. Can you explain that?

Chuck Billy: I can. As our planet's climate changes, what we're doing is we're effectively melting water, taking it out of the ice caps in places like Antarctica and Greenland, distributing it more widely in the ocean, and the ocean is getting hotter.

So it is expanding, covering a larger area of ​​the Earth's surface than it did before. What this means is that excess water in ocean basins puts a greater burden on parts of the Earth that have not been load-bearing for a given period of time. It's kind of this simple effect, but it's already happening in a lot of oceans.

Where do our fault lines begin in Virginia? Where do they end?

Where do they start and end? I can tell you that Virginia has errors from one end of the state to the other. Most of them are inactive faults, that is, faults that last slid or suffered an earthquake tens if not hundreds of millions of years ago. But some of these fault zones are actually areas of weakness: the rocks are crushed, and they're very weak.

In the modern world, sometimes there are enough pressures that you actually slip through some of these old mistakes. We would say that it has been re-energized.

The USGS survey notes that atmospheric pressure from major storms — such as hurricanes — has been shown to sometimes trigger what are known as slow earthquakes. Your thoughts on that?

Another way to think about this is that when we say earthquake, we have a very clear image in our mind; This will be a fault that ruptures, and immediately we have sort of seismic waves of shaking, which can go from subtle to violent, and which radiate in all directions from the epicenter.

It turns out that there are slow earthquakes and these slow earthquakes occur when a fault zone is actively slipping, but they do so at a more rapid pace. This usually happens because there is enough water in these fault zones, such that the pressures are such that the molecules are able to slip and slide, if you will.

These kind of slow earthquakes are things that are sort of a modern active research frontier trying to figure out exactly when and how they move. Some of them, especially those at the shallow surface, may respond to changes in atmospheric pressure. I wouldn't say this is the primary driver, but it is possible.

What can we expect in the coming years?

I think the simple answer to your question, Phil, is that we will have more climate change, we will have more earthquakes. Whether they are directly related or not is a big question. We will continue to have earthquakes, because the processes that move our planet – plate tectonic processes – are always there at work.

In certain circumstances, pressures will build up. Faults in Virginia are likely to be reactivated in places like New York or New Jersey due to some of these pressures. A few weeks ago, we had a moderate-sized earthquake west of New York City, and it caught a lot of people's attention.

This was an ancient mistake, but it has been revitalized by modern pressures.

Professor Billy, as usual, a wonderful and fascinating interview. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.

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