"Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors."

-Jonas Salk

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Welcome to the Anthropocene


No, nothing human caused a 9.0 earthquake. But the worst parts of the tsunami were very strange. Perhaps unprecedented?


Things are all connected now. We are a force of nature.


3 comments:

ozhamlet said...

While we can't pin the Sendai earthquake on global warming, just as we can't pin any particular extreme weather event on global warming, there is a straight forward mechanism linking global warming to seismic activity: melting ice sheets mainly in Greenland and Antarctica are causing the tectonic plates on which they sit to move upwards in the viscous upper mantle. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isostasy#Isostatic_effects_of_ice-sheets

Michael Tobis said...

The forces are too small for a major tectonic event once you do the numbers, though there may be smaller quakes in the ice retreat areas.

David B. Benson said...

I've seen a picture of a lrage ocean vessel completely washed up on a wide beach in the Bay of Bengal. I assume a tropical cyclone what done it.