Early Holocene Greenland-ice mass loss likely triggered earthquakes and tsunami.
Due to their large mass, ice sheets induce significant stresses in the Earth's crust. Stress release during deglaciation can trigger large-magnitude earthquakes, as indicated by surface faults in northern Europe. Although glacially-induced stresses have been analyzed in northern Europe, they ha...
| Published in: | Earth and Planetary Science Letters |
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , |
| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | unknown |
| Published: |
Elsevier
2020
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://dro.dur.ac.uk/31258/ http://dro.dur.ac.uk/31258/1/31258.pdf http://dro.dur.ac.uk/31258/2/31258.pdf https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2020.116443 |
| Summary: | Due to their large mass, ice sheets induce significant stresses in the Earth's crust. Stress release during deglaciation can trigger large-magnitude earthquakes, as indicated by surface faults in northern Europe. Although glacially-induced stresses have been analyzed in northern Europe, they have not yet been analyzed for Greenland. We know that the Greenland Ice Sheet experienced a large melting period in the early Holocene, and so here, we analyze glacially-induced stresses during deglaciation for Greenland for the first time. Instability occurs in southern Greenland, where we use a combined analysis of past sea level indicators and a model of glacially-induced fault reactivation to show that deglaciation of the Greenland Ice Sheet may have caused a large magnitude earthquake or a series of smaller magnitude earthquakes around 10,600 years ago offshore south-western Greenland. The earthquake(s) may have shifted relative sea level observations by several meters. If the earthquake-induced stress release was created during a single event, it could have produced a tsunami in the North Atlantic Ocean with runup heights of up to 7.2 m in the British Isles and up to 7.8 m along Canadian coasts. |
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