Until I met Bill McGuire, I just did not appreciate the depth of the impact that climate change is having on the ground beneath my feet.
Professor McGuire is a natural hazards expert and something of a lighting rIod for research into volcanoes and earthquakes. In 1997, he opened the UCL Natural Hazards Centre, with funding from re-insurers Aon Benfield.
“It sounds a bit mad that climate change can trigger things like volcanic eruptions and tsunamis,” McGuire told me, “but this is absolutely true.”
Behind Euston Station
McGuire welcomed me into his office in a building behind Euston Station in London. I was there to make a podcast about his research and found myself peeking at his bookshelves, occupied not only by volumes on Earth science but rocks and minerals, as well as the odd personal snapshot.
McGuire and his colleagues are used to instability – not only do they study volcanoes, earthquakes, typhoons and other wind storms, but their centre is here only temporarily while their permanent home is refurbished. Dislodged but undeterred, McGuire persists with his scientific message about climate change and the solid Earth.
“It’s not speculation,” McGuire stresses, keen to combat the sceptical rhetoric that is coming to dominate public discourse on climate change. “We can look back in time to when the climate was changing very dramatically in the past, and we can see this type of reaction [in the Earth].”
Bill McGuire in his office at the UCL Natural Hazards Centre
The canary in the cage
Specifically, McGuire is talking about the time when the last glacial age came to an end, between 110,000 and 15,000 years ago. The great ice sheets melted, sea levels rose by 130 metres and the Earth’s crust endured profound changes in pressure. As the receding ice sheets revealed the land that became known as Iceland, volcanic activity exploded by 50 per cent. The currently calm Lapland, over in Scandinavia, endured earthquakes as powerful as those we see today around the Pacific Rim.
Events such as these are not matters of mere historical record. Projections of anthropogenic climate change plot rises in temperature and sea levels that are comparable to those at the end of the last ice age. This fact alone is enough to convince scientists like McGuire to expect some sort of geological reaction.
When I met him, I asked McGuire whether we’re seeing anything of the sort already. He pointed me to Alaska, which he calls “the canary in the cage”. The ground on which the American state sits is already known to be active. But as temperatures rise and the Alaskan ice melts, the crust is on the move, which can have major consequences.
“We’re already seeing an increase in earthquake activity,” says McGuire. “And it can be very nicely correlated with the loss of ice – the more ice you lose, the more the crust comes up, the more earthquakes you get.”
Although Alaskan residents have endured one magnitude 7 quake that, according to McGuire, was linked to the loss of ice; in general, it is causing only minor shakes at the moment. But the science says that this is a trend that will remain as long as the ice continues to melt. What’s more, earthquakes along a fault line will continue unabated, as the pressure changes that result from melting ice force the crust to react, but earlier than otherwise could be expected.
Not just Alaska
“That’s the sort of effect that we would expect to see around the world where you have ice melting very rapidly and were you have active faults sitting underneath,” says McGuire. “Those faults will have ruptured anyway at some point, but this will bring that rupturing moment forward so you will start seeing clustering of earthquakes in these sorts of areas.”
Even if the effect of climate change on tectonics has not reached public consciousness, it is not new science. Over the past decade, scientists have published papers connecting earthquake in Japan to the amount of snow that falls and the speed with which it melts. Other studies have connected storm systems to earthquake clusters in Taiwan.
Some people are still arguing over whether climate change is actually happening, while staggering volumes of evidence show that it is. McGuire clearly finds the so-called ‘climate sceptics’ irksome. And in their reluctance to act on climate change, in effect, many governments are no better.
“Well, they sort of listen,” quips McGuire. “To some degree. For a while.”
Jaded
He is not unfairly cynical. As a long-term adviser to various governments and working groups, McGuire is all too aware of how politicians can raise and drop the threat of natural hazards when it suits them. In the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, McGuire joined the Natural Hazards Working Group set up by Prime Minister Tony Blair (pdf).
He worked with experts around the world to draft recommendations for how to prepare for, and react to, such huge disasters, including an International Science Panel for Natural Hazard Assessment. Blair presented the ideas to the UN, which agreed to take them on board. “To be honest, nothing’s happened since,” he says. “We still don’t have a panel pinpointing these threats.”
You don’t have to be an expert to know that it is a matter of time before the next natural catastrophe strikes. But you do need expertise to know how it could happen, and therefore how to prepare for it. As temperatures continue to rise and ice sheets continue to fall, more people should be listening to folks like Bill McGuire.
Etna image courtesy of Albe86.