According to the Celsias blog, Global Warming is causing this increased earth quake activity that we see in the news today. Glacial movement in Greenland due to the melting ice is causing world wide earth quakes because they are rooted deeply into the earth’s tectonic plates.
So I went on over to the National Climatic Data Center and pulled mean Ocean and Land temperature data. Afterwards I went to USGS and pulled their historical earthquake data. I found some very interesting correlation with regards to this concept.
I first cropped the mean Ocean and Land Temperature data to show only the years 1980 to 2007 then proceeded to graph the earthquake data frequency.
Below is the data featuring earthquakes with intensity 1.0 and 9.9. You will notice that it matches the trend of the temperature data.
Then I started to play around with it some more. I removed all earth quake data with frequency 2.9 and below because they could be considered minor quakes and not really known to cause that much damage. The data shows that it still has the same trend as the temperature data. What is surprising however is that the frequency has increased dramatically in 2004
I wanted to breakdown further the data and see which earth quake intensities occur more. You will notice from the two graphs below that almost all intensity ranges are increasing in step with the global world temperature.
There is some merit to the news that global warming is causing increased earthquake activity. I was curious however as to why since 2005 the mean temperature seems to be trending down. Is this really trending down or is it just the normal dance of temperature through the years but will still show a positive trend upwards eventually?
What is even more scary though is the marked increase in occurrence of earth quakes with intensities 8.0 -9.9. In 2007 four of these occurred. We are halfway through the year in 2008 and yet remarkably no earthquake of that intensity was recorded, I am hoping that that figure won’t catch up with the statistic.
USGS points out in their site however that it could be something else that’s causing this increased earthquake activity:
Although it may seem that we are having more earthquakes, earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 or greater have remained fairly constant…A partial explanation may lie in the fact that in the last twenty years, we have definitely had an increase in the number of earthquakes we have been able to locate each year. This is because of the tremendous increase in the number of seismograph stations in the world and the many improvements in global communications. In 1931, there were about 350 stations operating in the world; today, there are more than 8,000 stations and the data now comes in rapidly from these stations by electronic mail, internet and satellite. This increase in the number of stations and the more timely receipt of data has allowed us and other seismological centers to locate earthquakes more rapidly and to locate many small earthquakes which were undetected in earlier years. The NEIC now locates about 20,000 earthquakes each year or approximately 50 per day. Also, because of the improvements in communications and the increased interest in the environment and natural disasters, the public now learns about more earthquakes.[source]
Somehow, I don’t feel really assured by that.
[Global Temp Source, Earth Quake Data Source]
Category: Global Warming, Earth Quakes
