There are massive climate-induced earthquakes brewing beneath our largest cities. Are we ready?

Surprisingly, earthquakes shake the US state of California about 10,000 times a year, on average – roughly once every hour.

California's official nickname is the Golden State, which harks back to the gold rush of the mid-19th century that saw its population rise in just four years, from 14,000 to a quarter of a million.

But if you are lucky enough to visit this area and feel the ground shifting under your feet, you will probably agree that “earthquake condition” is much better.

None of this should be surprising, given that it hosts the San Andreas Fault, where two of the world's greatest tectonic plates meet — the North American plate to the east and the Pacific plate to the west.

California has attracted the world's attention in recent years, not because of its earthquakes, but because of its wildfires and massive floods – all because of global warming and its disruption of our once stable climate.

The San Andreas Fault, one of the most active fault lines on the planet, lies beneath California, the most populous state in America. Image credit: Getty Images

News that such extreme weather could also boost seismic activity is unwelcome in one of the planet's largest 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 could also affect the ground beneath our feet seems laughable. However, this is true.

For decades, I've been researching how climate causes deadly geological phenomena, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions, and the evidence is quite clear.

The latest research by the Swiss Seismological Service, published in the summer of 2025, links clusters of small tremors under Mont Blanc in the European Alps to the rapid melting of ice and snow during the 2015 heatwave.

Seismic activity below Mont Blanc is thought to be linked to meltwater seeping from the mountain above – Image credit: Alamy

Excess water crept down, eventually finding its way into the main fault zone cutting through the 12-kilometre (7-mile) Mont Blanc Road tunnel, lubricating it and making it move enough to trigger a wave of low-level seismic activity.

Since then, the incidence of small tremors has remained high, greatly increasing the risk of larger earthquakes in the future.

As global warming continues to cause longer and more intense heatwaves, meltwater from accelerating glacial melt and thawing permafrost is expected to increase seismic activity across the world's high mountain ranges, and large areas of permafrost in Canada and Siberia.

In addition to raising concerns among those living in the Mont Blanc region, the Swiss research also offers lessons for any town or city about geological faults that have caused large earthquakes in the past; Think Tokyo in Japan, and San Francisco and Los Angeles in California.

None of these cities are mountainous, so meltwater is not a problem, but there are other ways in which climate change could increase the rate of water seeping into the faults that threaten these cities.

Tokyo, for example, is under increasing threat from typhoons as climate change makes it slower and wetter.

As a result, storms now dump more rain along their path, increasing the amount available to filter down to the ground and into active fault zones.

Climate change is making typhoons that hit Tokyo slower and wetter, increasing the volume of water falling on Japan and seeping into fault zones underneath – Image source: Getty Images

The probability of a serious earthquake hitting the Japanese capital within the next 30 years or so is thought to be 70 percent, so anything that could increase that probability is a big deal.

The biggest concern is not, as in the Alps, that water will trigger swarms of small earthquakes, but that water seeping into a fault teetering on the brink of rupture will trigger the “big quake.”

One of my seismologist colleagues is fond of warning that all that is needed to cause a large earthquake on a “locked and loaded” fault is handshake pressure.

The small force exerted by water percolation into the crack area may be sufficient.

California awaits the next big event as well, whether to the north, in the San Francisco Bay Area, or further south near Los Angeles.

The US Geological Survey believes there is a more than 70 percent chance that an earthquake of magnitude 6.7 or larger, capable of causing widespread damage, will strike the Gulf region in the next 18 years.

Southern California has a higher level of earthquake risk – in fact, the highest in the entire country – and more than 300 faults in the area could trigger dangerous earthquakes.

Here, San Andreas itself represents the greatest threat, as the probability of a 7.5 magnitude earthquake occurring in the next three decades is estimated at more than 1 in 3.

Once it does happen, such an event is expected to kill about 2,000 people and cost a whopping $200 billion in damage.

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Rivers in the sky

Given that a number of faults in the state are largely ripe and ready to go, the concern is that climate change may provide an additional driving force that advances the timing of the next big earthquake.

In recent years, California has been hit hard by what are known as atmospheric rivers.

Heavy rains, caused by atmospheric rivers carrying increasing amounts of water, are leading to increasingly frequent flooding in California – the state that straddles the San Andreas Fault – Image credit: Getty Images

Sometimes called “rivers in the sky,” they are atmospheric phenomena that are thousands of kilometers long and a few hundred kilometers wide, and carry enormous amounts of water vapor—up to 15 times the flow of the mouth of the Mississippi River.

Atmospheric rivers are not uncommon throughout California, including the so-called Rapid Pineapple River that draws moisture all the way from Hawaii, but in recent years they have grown, dumping massive amounts of rain and snow across the state.

Climate change is making such rivers larger and wetter, while the strongest rivers – known as Class V – are becoming more common.

In February 2024, an atmospheric river brought 48 hours of continuous rainfall to Southern California. It caused landslides and mudflows, knocked out power to nearly a million people, and caused flash flooding throughout Los Angeles.

Early 2025 also saw flooding from atmospheric rivers across the region, resulting in flooding and loss of life.

The combination of rainstorms and active faults on the edge of a rupture is not a recipe for seismic disaster, but together they certainly have the potential to trigger a large earthquake by greasing the faults.

Moreover, there is now convincing evidence – from the other side of the world – linking rainfall to large seismic shocks.

Like California, Taiwan is no stranger to earthquakes, so the 7.6 magnitude Chi Chi earthquake that struck central parts of the country in September 1999 was no surprise.

The event was both devastating and deadly, destroying more than 50,000 buildings and claiming nearly 2,500 lives. It also happened just three years after Super Typhoon Herb dropped a few meters of rain across the region.

This in itself may be a coincidence, but at least four other major earthquakes in Taiwan over the past half century have followed particularly wet storms.

Moreover, earthquakes of magnitude 6 or higher that have affected the country appear to be five times more likely to occur within four years of a major storm event than others.

Reducing the load

However, there is a twist in this story. Given the large time lag between storms and earthquakes, rainwater quickly seeping through the ground and lubrication faults are unlikely to be the link. Instead, there must be something slower in the acting.

One suggestion is that the occurrence of thousands of landslides caused by heavy rainfall, and the removal of debris by erosion, reduces the weight the faults bear, allowing them to slide more easily.

The unloaded weight is very small, but again it is all about “handshake pressure”.

There is a similar relationship between earthquakes and rainstorms on the Caribbean island of Haiti, where a devastating earthquake in 2010, which killed at least 160,000 people, followed a series of four extremely wet hurricanes two years earlier.

California is also facing a similar situation, where heavy rains caused by flowing atmospheric rivers are promoting landslides and mudflows across the state.

The situation is exacerbated by the vast expanses of barren land exposed by catastrophic forest fires in recent years, which were also caused by global warming.

The earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010 came after a series of very wet hurricanes that had struck the Caribbean island in previous years – Image credit: Alami

As such, any crack ready to rupture faces the double whammy of rainwater infiltration, landslide discharge, and erosion, either or both of which can cause it to burst.

The problem, however, is that when the next big disaster strikes—either under the Bay Area or Los Angeles—we will likely never know whether rainwater percolation or unloading was the contributing cause; whether climate change has played a role; Or whether the timing of the earthquake is entirely due to geological processes.

This raises an important point about the overall impact of climate change on seismic activity.

In general, it has no ability to cause additional earthquakes, only the ability – with that little extra push – to advance the timing of an event that would have happened at some point anyway.

So, don't expect to see a huge increase in the number of large earthquakes, or even any that can be distinguished from the natural background.

Collapse

However, there are some parts of the world where the Earth's seismic response to our rapidly changing climate is clear and present – they are in areas where large ice masses are experiencing wholesale melting. Alaska, for example.

In the largest US states, there has been an increase in seismic activity following the loss of a vertical kilometer (more than half a mile) of ice in some places in the past century or so.

Unloading this enormous weight from the crust allows the faults below to slide more easily.

Looking to the future, Greenland is by far the biggest concern in this regard.

Seismically, the planet's largest island is ominously quiet; Not because there aren't any faults there, but because the sheer weight of the ice above them prevents them from sliding.

But this is unlikely to last, because the 3 km (1.8 mi) thick Greenland ice sheet, which contains enough water to raise global sea levels by 7 meters (23 ft), is melting faster than ever before.

California wildfires, intensified by climate change, have made vast swaths of land more vulnerable to landslides, reducing pressure on any faults below – Image Credit: Getty Images

Since the early 1990s, GIS has lost a staggering 6 trillion tons of ice, generating so much meltwater that it covers the entire United States to a depth of half a meter (1.6 feet).

As the melting continues, it reduces the load on the faults below, so it wouldn't be at all surprising if the island began to shake.

Any cracks under the ice would build up pressure and seal themselves for thousands of years, so we're talking about the possibility of some serious earthquakes on the horizon.

Just under 11,000 years ago, the loss of Greenland's ice mass at the end of the last ice age triggered an 8.3-magnitude earthquake off the southern tip of the island.

Simulations suggest it generated a large tsunami that sent waves up to 7 meters (23 feet) high to crash into the coasts of Canada and the United Kingdom.

Something similar happened just over 8,000 years ago, when a massive earthquake in Norway, triggered by the melting of the Scandinavian ice sheet, triggered one of the world's largest underwater landslides, which in turn sent a massive tsunami into the North Atlantic, this time with waves exceeding 20 meters (65 feet) high.

Atlantic tsunamis on the scale of those we see today within the Pacific Ring of Fire are a horrific and unexpected consequence of global warming.

But the truth is that the comprehensive nature of the resulting climate collapse means that nothing and no place is immune, including the ground beneath our feet.

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