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Uh oh: Study Now Says Earthquakes are Causing Global Warming

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Photo Credit: AlamyEarthquakes may contribute to global warming by releasing greenhouse gas from the ocean floor, a study suggests.

Scientists uncovered evidence that a large earthquake in 1945 released more than seven million cubic metres of methane into the North Arabian Sea.

The discovery exposes a natural source of greenhouse gas emissions that has not been considered before, they claim.

As a greenhouse gas, methane is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, but less abundant in the atmosphere.

Enormous quantities of methane are locked in icy structures called hydrates on the floors of the continental shelves surrounding the Earth’s land masses.

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Static Electricity May Be Key to Predicting Earthquakes

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A rise in static electricity below the ground could be a reliable indicator that an earthquake is imminent, say scientists who are now launching an experiment to predict quakes well in time to save thousands of lives.

Tom Bleier, a satellite engineer with QuakeFinder, has spent millions of dollars putting specialist measuring equipment – magnetometers – along fault lines in California, Peru, Taiwan, and Greece, the ‘Daily Mail’ reported.

The instruments are sensitive enough to detect magnetic pulses from electrical discharges up to 16 kilometres away, which could give people enough time to get to safety before a quake strikes. Scientists’ theory is that, when an earthquake looms, activity below ground goes through a ‘strange change’, producing intense electrical currents.

“These currents are huge,” Bleier said at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco. “They’re on the order of 100,000 amperes for a magnitude 6 earthquake and a million amperes for a magnitude 7. It’s almost like lightning, underground,” Bleier added.

“In a typical day along the San Andreas fault, you might see ten pulses per day. The fault is always moving, grinding, snapping, and crackling,” he told National Geographic News. Before a large earthquake, that background level of static-electricity discharges should rise sharply, Bleier said.

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