Could Global Warming cause a Tsunami?

Question

Over millions (and MILLLLLIONS) of years Ice Ages have come and gone.

The earth's crust consists of moving, solid plates which float on liquid magma.

When weight is added (an Ice Age,lets say) the plates actually sink further into the magma they float upon. When the weight is removed (the end of an Ice Age, lets say) the plates float back up. This is known as "tectonic rebound".

Even today we still experience earthquakes due to the last Ice Age. So it is fact that changes in ice thickness can be a driving force of seismic events, earthquakes, etc and they in turn can produce tsunamis.

I wonder if anyone has studied the movement of large masses on the Earths surface and seismic effects due to it over a Geological timespan.

Could the amount of mass represented by the lost volume of polar ice in the last ... 100 years, say ...contributed enough strain on the Pacific Rim to trigger a seismic event? And can we expect more in the future due to melting polar ice caps?

Answer 1

I believe it could, but in a different way. You do know that tectonic plates are sensitive to the amount of rain that falls on the land. So here comes the global warming: melting the ice caps not only frees the water, but it also frees the carbon dioxide that is contained in the ice polar caps. This CO2 will cause an even stronger greenhouse effect and will result in more melting ice, more water and more rain.

And if enough rain falls on land it can cause an earthquake that will lower the land so it would be below the sea level. This would be a cause of a tsunami no one ever even imagined yet.

Answer 2

No checkout a discovery channels -HAAARP,was tsunami man made
and Mega tsunami

Mega tsunami is a mountain landslide wich falls into the seas causing a giant wave that can cross an Ocean ,there was one in Nortern Canada that was 25 meters high

a normal tsunami is a rippling earth tremor on the bottom of the sea creating a wave which also travels thousands of miles

and there are the posibilities mentioned in the documentary

Answer 3

Well...actually it could. What you said can actually happen but the percentage of it happening wouldn't be that high. But it definitely could have an impact on Tsunami occurance.

But mostly it is the natural explosions which occur under the plates that create earthquakes by making the plates move towards each other...

Answer 4

No, because if global warming did indeed cause tsunamis we would have already read about this theory in a scientific or geographical publication, and not from some anonymous ordinary Joe on Yahoo!

Answer 5

Yes as with the ocean levels rising, the lower the pressure in the area doesn't have to be very low, so more tsunami's would occur.

Answer 6

Plus Ça (Climate) Change
The Earth was warming before global warming was cool.

BY PETE DU PONT
Wednesday, February 21, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST (Wall Street Journal Online)

When Eric the Red led the Norwegian Vikings to Greenland in the late 900s, it was an ice-free farm country--grass for sheep and cattle, open water for fishing, a livable climate--so good a colony that by 1100 there were 3,000 people living there. Then came the Ice Age. By 1400, average temperatures had declined by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, the glaciers had crushed southward across the farmlands and harbors, and the Vikings did not survive.

Such global temperature fluctuations are not surprising, for looking back in history we see a regular pattern of warming and cooling. From 200 B.C. to A.D. 600 saw the Roman Warming period; from 600 to 900, the cold period of the Dark Ages; from 900 to 1300 was the Medieval warming period; and 1300 to 1850, the Little Ice Age.

During the 20th century the earth did indeed warm--by 1 degree Fahrenheit. But a look at the data shows that within the century temperatures varied with time: from 1900 to 1910 the world cooled; from 1910 to 1940 it warmed; from 1940 to the late 1970s it cooled again, and since then it has been warming. Today our climate is 1/20th of a degree Fahrenheit warmer than it was in 2001.

Many things are contributing to such global temperature changes. Solar radiation is one. Sunspot activity has reached a thousand-year high, according to European astronomy institutions. Solar radiation is reducing Mars's southern icecap, which has been shrinking for three summers despite the absence of SUVS and coal-fired electrical plants anywhere on the Red Planet. Back on Earth, a NASA study reports that solar radiation has increased in each of the past two decades, and environmental scholar Bjorn Lomborg, citing a 1997 atmosphere-ocean general circulation model, observes that "the increase in direct solar irradiation over the past 30 years is responsible for about 40 percent of the observed global warming."
Statistics suggest that while there has indeed been a slight warming in the past century, much of it was neither human-induced nor geographically uniform. Half of the past century's warming occurred before 1940, when the human population and its industrial base were far smaller than now. And while global temperatures are now slightly up, in some areas they are dramatically down. According to "Climate Change and Its Impacts," a study published last spring by the National Center for Policy Analysis, the ice mass in Greenland has grown, and "average summer temperatures at the summit of the Greenland ice sheet have decreased 4 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since the late 1980s." British environmental analyst Lord Christopher Monckton says that from 1993 through 2003 the Greenland ice sheet "grew an average extra thickness of 2 inches a year," and that in the past 30 years the mass of the Antarctic ice sheet has grown as well.

Earlier this month the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a summary of its fourth five-year report. Although the full report won't be out until May, the summary has reinvigorated the global warming discussion.
While global warming alarmism has become a daily American press feature, the IPCC, in its new report, is backtracking on its warming predictions. While Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" warns of up to 20 feet of sea-level increase, the IPCC has halved its estimate of the rise in sea level by the end of this century, to 17 inches from 36. It has reduced its estimate of the impact of global greenhouse-gas emissions on global climate by more than one-third, because, it says, pollutant particles reflect sunlight back into space and this has a cooling effect.

The IPCC confirms its 2001 conclusion that global warming will have little effect on the number of typhoons or hurricanes the world will experience, but it does not note that there has been a steady decrease in the number of global hurricane days since 1970--from 600 to 400 days, according to Georgia Tech atmospheric scientist Peter Webster.

The IPCC does not explain why from 1940 to 1975, while carbon dioxide emissions were rising, global temperatures were falling, nor does it admit that its 2001 "hockey stick" graph showing a dramatic temperature increase beginning in 1970s had omitted the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warming temperature changes, apparently in order to make the new global warming increases appear more dramatic.

Sometimes the consequences of bad science can be serious. In a 2000 issue of Nature Medicine magazine, four international scientists observed that "in less than two decades, spraying of houses with DDT reduced Sri Lanka's malaria burden from 2.8 million cases and 7,000 deaths [in 1948] to 17 cases and no deaths" in 1963. Then came Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring," invigorating environmentalism and leading to outright bans of DDT in some countries. When Sri Lanka ended the use of DDT in 1968, instead of 17 malaria cases it had 480,000.
Yet the Sierra Club in 1971 demanded "a ban, not just a curb," on the use of DDT "even in the tropical countries where DDT has kept malaria under control." International environmental controls were more important than the lives of human beings. For more than three decades this view prevailed, until the restrictions were finally lifted last September.

As we have seen since the beginning of time, and from the Vikings' experience in Greenland, our world experiences cyclical climate changes. America needs to understand clearly what is happening and why before we sign onto U.N. environmental agreements, shut down our industries and power plants, and limit our economic growth.

Mr. du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, is chairman of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. His column appears once a month.

Answer 7

yes it could. to know all these answers i suggest you watch an Inconvenient truth by Al Gore. Trust me, you will learn alot!

Answer 8

I think you answered your own question. I am saying yes,yes,and yes.

Answer 9

well it cant give rise to tsunami but it can help tsunami for bigger waves.