by Daniel Brouse
September 13, 2024
A seismic event, triggered by climate change, shook the Earth for nine days following a 650-foot tsunami in Greenland. As permafrost and glaciers melt, the ground becomes unstable. In this case, melting in East Greenland caused the collapse of a mountain, leading to a landslide that impacted the ocean and resulted in a massive tsunami. The reverberations from this event traveled from the Arctic to Antarctica within an hour.
The report, “A rockslide-generated tsunami in a Greenland fjord rang Earth for 9 days,” was published in the journal Science. One of the report’s authors, Kristian Svennevig from the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, said, “The completely unique thing about this event is how long the seismic signal lasted and how constant the frequency was. Other landslides and tsunamis have produced seismic signals, but only for a couple of hours and very locally. This one was observed globally, all the way to the Antarctic.”
In September 2023, 882 million cubic feet of rock and ice—a volume equivalent to 25 Empire State Buildings—fell into a fjord in a remote, uninhabited area about 124 miles from the ocean. The landslide triggered a 200-meter-high mega-tsunami at its epicenter, which became “trapped” in the narrow fjord, oscillating back and forth for nine days and generating persistent vibrations.
“We’ve never seen such a large-scale movement of water over such a long period,” said Dr. Stephen Hicks from UCL, one of the scientists involved. “That glacier was supporting the mountain, but it got so thin that it just stopped holding it up. It shows how climate change is now impacting these regions.”