Global Warming and tectonic plate movement

Gamini DISSANAYAKE

That more and more scientists (97 percent in USA only) now agree that Global Warming is caused by human activity, mainly by burning of fossil fuels for transportation, to generate electricity, to operate homes, business and industries and from agricultural practices and tropical deforestation, has got the better of the deniers and in most cases their sponsors like Big Oil and other powerful lobby groups.

Dr Lovelock in his 2009 book ‘The Vanishing Face of Gaia: Final Warning’ urged us to save ourselves and not try to save the planet. He figures, the nine billion plus world population (easily reachable by the middle of this century) and rising, would be reduced to 20 percent or to even 500 million by the end of the century.

Lovelock’s earlier work ‘The Revenge of Gaia’ (2006) was begun when hurricane Katrina was devastating New Orleans. “Horrific though it was” he wrote, “it distracts us from the more extensive suffering caused by the tsunami of December 2004 that disastrously splashed across the bowl of the Indian Ocean. That awful event starkly revealed the power of the Earth to kill. The planet we live on has merely to shrug to take some fraction of a million people to their death. But this is nothing compared with what may soon happen. We are now so abusing the Earth that it may rise and move back to the hot state it was in 55 million years ago, and if it does, most of us, and our descendants will die.”

Greenhouse gas emissions

In other words, for thousands of years, humans have exploited the planet without counting the cost. Now Gaia, the living Earth is fighting back.

Industrial wastage contributes to global warming.

Lynas’ work ‘The Carbon Calculator: Easy Ways to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint’ (2007) and ‘Chris Goodall’s Ten Technologies to Save the Planet’ (2008) are two popular books that empower us to fight Global Warming.

Another path-breaking book was George Monbiot’s ‘Heat: How to Save the Planet from Burning’ (2006). An ambitious work that says we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions up to 90 percent by 2030 using easy means. These include “improved ways to construct homes and buildings, providing the best mix of renewable and non-renewable power sources to those buildings, making changes to land transportation without significantly reducing mobility, expanding public transportation/transit like buses and trains and curtailing of air travel”.

Interestingly, Monbiot begins his chapter on Transportation with a quote from the Russian journalist and novelist Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967) who wrote that clear as the conscience of (automaker) Monsieur Citroen, the motorcar is destined to destroy the world, and fittingly, Monbiot comments, may be this guy saw something in 1929 that we failed to see for a long time!

Speaking of cars and CO2 emissions The Independent (UK) carried a study report on April 13, 2012 which said “Painting roofs white and using light-coloured materials to surface roads and pavements would not only make cities cooler in summer, it would save the same amount of carbon as taking all the cars off the roads for 50 years. The scientists (who did the study) also have said that one of the simplest, yet most effective, ways of engineering the urban environment to cope with global warming is to increase the reflectivity of the cityscape so that more of the incoming sunlight is directed back into space…”

So, we can still do a few more things to keep the global temperature rise within 2C (or below 450 CO2 ppm) which reminds me of the walloping wisdom of a poster hung on the wall of my dentist’s office waiting area in Toronto. “You do not need to floss all your teeth everyday, only the ones you want to keep”.

Giant earthquakes

Writing to the prestigious science weekly Nature (Mar 31, 2005) Prof. Kerry Sieh of the Tectonic Observatory, California Institute of Technology, USA, on December 26, 2004 Earthquake of 9.3 magnitude and the ensuing Indian Ocean Tsunami, observed that “because many of the giant faults in the Aceh-Andaman neighbourhood have been dormant for a very long time, it is quite plausible that the recent giant earthquake and tsunami may not be the only disastrous 21st century manifestation of the Indian plate’s unsteady tectonic journey northward’.

And in a letter to Nature on Sep. 6, 2007 Dr. Phil R. Cummins of Geoscience Australia and a senior consultant to the government of Australia wrote “the risk of another giant earthquake is high off central Sumatra, …similar indicators suggest a high potential for giant earthquakes along the coast of Myanmar,” although “there seems to be relatively little concern about the subduction zone to the North, in the Northern Bay of Bengal along the coast of Myanmar”.

Dr. Cummins’ views have to be taken seriously along with those of James Cochran and others that the Indo-Australian Plate is breaking up (into two separate plates) forming a new boundary off the South coast of Sri Lanka.

The vulnerability of Sri Lanka to Earthquakes and Tsunamis is now well known thanks to Prof C B Dissanayake and others who are of the view that since a number of quakes of over 7 mag have occurred on this plate boundary, we can anticipate more frequent tremors that can lead to bigger quakes affecting Sri Lanka.

Volcanic eruptions

Though scientists are yet unable to predict the exact dates, they anticipate megathrust earthquakes when a cluster of smaller quakes occur in given location or in its neighbourhood over a short period.

In 2004, there were no less than seven earthquakes of over 6 magnitude in Indonesia before the big one of 9.3 mag struck on December 26.

The recent April 11 quakes in Aceh Province of Indonesia of 8.6 and 8.2 mag were preceded by a 7.2 quake off West coast of Northern Sumatra on January 11 and a 6.2 magnitude on March 20 near Abepura, Indonesia were followed by a 6.2 mag quake on April 15 off the coast of Sumatra. There was also a 5.4 magnitude quake in Sulawesi, Indonesia on May 1.

And we also see that except for the year 2007 which recorded 2,270 quakes worldwide including four big ones ranging between 8-8.9 magnitude, the last three years have recorded over 2,000 quakes apiece, that is, 2,057 quakes in 2009, 2,136 in 2010 and 2,464 in 2011. For the year 2000 the number was 1,505 and for 2005 it was 1,844.

(Three of the World’s Ten Worst Volcanic Eruptions have also occurred in Indonesia. The April 1816 Mt. Tambora eruption killed 92, 000 people, the August 1883 Mt Krakatoa caused a death toll of 36,000 and the October 1882 Mt Galunggung eruption in Java, Indonesia took 4011 lives)

And just last year a team of scientists from Australia, France and Germany, for the first time, were able to show a link between global warming and tectonic plate movement.

To be continued

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