Climate Change-Linked Landslide 'Pounded' Earth for 9 Days, Researchers SayExBulletin

Images from Dixon Strait show before (August 2023) and after (September 2023) images of the mountain and glacier where a large landslide triggered the tsunami. Soren Rysgaard .

Switch caption Soren Rysgaard

The global seismic signal was so unusual, it reverberated for more than a week. So it’s no surprise that it caught the attention of researchers around the world. In the end, it took 68 experts from 15 countries to figure out what caused the “USO,” or unidentified seismic object, last September.

“The USO sign is an informal term that some seismologists use when they come across a seismic signal they can't explain,” Christian Svennevig, lead author of a new report on the unusual signal, tells NPR.

When scientists studied the signal, one thing was certain from the start: it was not caused by an earthquake.

“You can compare the vibrations from an earthquake to crushing your hands into a piano with full force and then removing them again,” Svenvig says, creating a mess of notes and sounds that fade away fairly quickly.

“The signal we describe is very similar to pressing a single piano key to get a very pure tone that lasts for nine days.”

The signal was traced to a massive ice collapse along Dixon Strait in eastern Greenland, caused by melting ice due to climate change, according to research published by Svennevig and about 70 co-authors in the journal Science.

About 1.2 kilometers above the distant gorge, a mountain peak collapsed, sending more than 25 million cubic meters of rock and ice sliding into the water. Researchers say the volume of material was enough to fill 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

The tsunami in question was 200 meters (656 feet) high, according to the researchers. Because the wave energy was trapped in a rocky strait, the water moved back and forth in a phenomenon called a seismic pattern — and scientists traced the seismic signal detected on sensors from the Arctic to Antarctica to this pattern.

Satellite images show a mountain peak and glacier before and after a landslide. Planet Labs satellite image .

. for Planet Labs satellite image

Svennevig says their work toward an answer was slow. Even when they gained an understanding of what likely happened, they needed more time and data to prove it.

“It was only when we had access to the declassified deep-sea maps that the military had put together and modified our tsunami models that we were able to prove this through modelling: that part of the tsunami had occurred between the two parallel sides of the fjord and reverberated for nine days,” he says.

The earthquake was 7 meters high and had a long duration, “with a frequency (11.45 millihertz) and slow decay in amplitude that were almost identical to the seismic signal” which had a frequency of 10.88 millihertz and oscillated approximately every 90 seconds, according to the article.

For the researchers, the signal was a wake-up call — a bell that “rang” Earth for nine days. Of the many wake-up calls humanity has received about the effects of climate change, this was one of the most striking yet, they say. And they warn that we could see similar cascading events in the future.

“We might expect similar signals to appear if a landslide occurs in a fjord or a lake of similar shape,” says Svennev. “We certainly expect landslides and tsunamis to increase in the Arctic as a result of global warming.”

After solving the mystery of the global seismic signal, Svennevig says there is still more work to be done to understand how the planet adapts to climate change.

“There is a lot to learn from this event: Climate change is causing new natural phenomena that we could not have dreamed of just a year ago,” he says. “There are still many unsolved mysteries that await the next generation of geologists to uncover.”

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