Seismic ground vibrations give advanced early-warning of subglacial floods
Glacier runoff and melt from volcanic and geothermal activity accumulates in glacier dammed lakes in glaciated areas around the world. These lakes eventually drain, creating hazardous subglacial floods that are usually only confirmed after they exit the glacier and reach local river systems, which c...
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ftpubmed:oai:pubmedcentral.nih.gov:7237689 2023-05-15T16:21:42+02:00 Seismic ground vibrations give advanced early-warning of subglacial floods Eibl, Eva P. S. Bean, Christopher J. Einarsson, Bergur Pàlsson, Finnur Vogfjörd, Kristin S. 2020-05-19 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7237689/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32427822 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-15744-5 en eng Nature Publishing Group UK http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7237689/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32427822 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-15744-5 © The Author(s) 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. CC-BY Nat Commun Article Text 2020 ftpubmed https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-15744-5 2020-05-31T00:21:22Z Glacier runoff and melt from volcanic and geothermal activity accumulates in glacier dammed lakes in glaciated areas around the world. These lakes eventually drain, creating hazardous subglacial floods that are usually only confirmed after they exit the glacier and reach local river systems, which can be many tens of kilometres from the flood source. Once in the river systems, they travel rapidly to populated areas. Such delayed detection represents a potentially lethal shortcoming in early-warning. Here we demonstrate how to advance early-warning potential through the analysis of four such floods in a glaciated region of Iceland. By comparing exceptional multidisciplinary hydrological, GPS and seismic ground vibration (tremor) data, we show that array analysis of seismic tremor can be used for early location and tracking of the subglacial flood front. Furthermore the timing and size of the impending flood can be estimated, prior to it entering the river system. Advanced warnings of between 20 to 34 hours are achieved for large (peak discharge of more than 3000 m(3)/s, accumulation time of ~ 5.25 years) to small floods (peak discharges from 210 to 380 m(3)/s, accumulation times of ~ 1.3 years) respectively. Text glacier Iceland PubMed Central (PMC) Nature Communications 11 1 |
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Article Eibl, Eva P. S. Bean, Christopher J. Einarsson, Bergur Pàlsson, Finnur Vogfjörd, Kristin S. Seismic ground vibrations give advanced early-warning of subglacial floods |
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Article |
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Glacier runoff and melt from volcanic and geothermal activity accumulates in glacier dammed lakes in glaciated areas around the world. These lakes eventually drain, creating hazardous subglacial floods that are usually only confirmed after they exit the glacier and reach local river systems, which can be many tens of kilometres from the flood source. Once in the river systems, they travel rapidly to populated areas. Such delayed detection represents a potentially lethal shortcoming in early-warning. Here we demonstrate how to advance early-warning potential through the analysis of four such floods in a glaciated region of Iceland. By comparing exceptional multidisciplinary hydrological, GPS and seismic ground vibration (tremor) data, we show that array analysis of seismic tremor can be used for early location and tracking of the subglacial flood front. Furthermore the timing and size of the impending flood can be estimated, prior to it entering the river system. Advanced warnings of between 20 to 34 hours are achieved for large (peak discharge of more than 3000 m(3)/s, accumulation time of ~ 5.25 years) to small floods (peak discharges from 210 to 380 m(3)/s, accumulation times of ~ 1.3 years) respectively. |
format |
Text |
author |
Eibl, Eva P. S. Bean, Christopher J. Einarsson, Bergur Pàlsson, Finnur Vogfjörd, Kristin S. |
author_facet |
Eibl, Eva P. S. Bean, Christopher J. Einarsson, Bergur Pàlsson, Finnur Vogfjörd, Kristin S. |
author_sort |
Eibl, Eva P. S. |
title |
Seismic ground vibrations give advanced early-warning of subglacial floods |
title_short |
Seismic ground vibrations give advanced early-warning of subglacial floods |
title_full |
Seismic ground vibrations give advanced early-warning of subglacial floods |
title_fullStr |
Seismic ground vibrations give advanced early-warning of subglacial floods |
title_full_unstemmed |
Seismic ground vibrations give advanced early-warning of subglacial floods |
title_sort |
seismic ground vibrations give advanced early-warning of subglacial floods |
publisher |
Nature Publishing Group UK |
publishDate |
2020 |
url |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7237689/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32427822 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-15744-5 |
genre |
glacier Iceland |
genre_facet |
glacier Iceland |
op_source |
Nat Commun |
op_relation |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7237689/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32427822 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-15744-5 |
op_rights |
© The Author(s) 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
op_rightsnorm |
CC-BY |
op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-15744-5 |
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Nature Communications |
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11 |
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1 |
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1766009692846292992 |