No one was injured in the tsunami, although it washed away centuries-old cultural heritage sites and damaged an empty military base. But this stretch of water is on a commonly used cruise ship route. If one had been there at the time, “the consequences would have been devastating,” the study’s authors wrote.
Eastern Greenland had never experienced a landslide and tsunami like this before, Svennevig said. It shows new areas of the Arctic are “coming online” for these kinds of climate events, he added.
As the Arctic continues to warm — over the past few decades, the region has warmed four times faster than the rest of the world — landslide-triggered mega-tsunamis may become more common and with deadly consequences.
In June 2017, a tsunami in northwest Greenland killed four people and washed away houses. The threat goes beyond Greenland, Svennevig said; similar-shaped fjords exist in other regions, including Alaska, parts of Canada and Norway.
What happened in Greenland last September “once again demonstrates the ongoing destabilization of large mountain slopes in the Arctic due to amplified climate warming,” said Paula Snook, a landslide geologist at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences who was not involved in the study.
Recent rock avalanches in the Arctic as well as in Alpine regions, are “an alarming signal,” she told CNN. “We are thawing ground which has been in a cold, frozen state for many thousands of years.”
There’s still a lot of research to be done on rock avalanches, which are also affected by natural processes, cautioned Lena Rubensdotter, a researcher at the Geological Survey of Norway, who was also not involved in the study.
However, she added, it’s “logical to assume that we will see more frequent rock collapses in permafrost slopes as the climate warms in Arctic regions.”
The discovery of natural phenomena behaving in seemingly unnatural ways highlights how this part of the world is changing in unexpected ways, Svennevig said.
“It’s a sign that climate change is pushing these systems into uncharted waters.”
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Publish date : 2024-09-14 04:41:00
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